A Place in the Sun
by RockyKelboa
Summary: Just when high school summer break was about to go his way, Vegeta's forced to accompany his baby brother on a weekend playdate with their cousins at the remote, Northwoods cabin of the prestigious Briefs family—an endeavor which, for the notorious social outcast, is complicated by more than just unsolicited attention from the Briefs' vivacious daughter. For VBO Summer Prompts.
1. Sunbathe

_Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at /works/19298227. Written for the Vegebulocracy 2019 Summer Prompts._

* * *

**Chapter 1: Sunbathe**

The A-line frame of the Briefs' cabin came into view. Small and simple, with stacked logs and reflective panes of glass, it was almost camouflaged with the surrounding wood and was far more rustic than Vegeta expected from the richest family in West City, whose estate was an abstract, modern monstrosity—an organic dome structure that swelled up from a flat, grassy plot in the middle of the metropolis and was often mistaken by tourists for a museum of contemporary art. And that, at least every time he'd been there, was bustling with a team of staff and a never-ending stream of guests. Anyone who was anyone, from politicians to corporate shareholders to celebrities, attended the Briefs' frequent parties. Their lakehome was so paradoxically normal by comparison. Its private road wasn't even paved. Gravel crunched beneath the wheels of his car as they slowed down a long tree-lined drive.

The car hadn't yet shifted to park when Kakarot bounded outside to meet them, a little bull released from his gate with the screen door snapping shut, almost nicking his heels behind him. Tarble hurriedly unbuckled his seatbelt, squealing for Vegeta to unlock the door and let him out to meet his cousin. The kid was going to be a brute like his older brother. At seven, he wasn't that tall, but he was dense as a bowling ball, nearly knocking Tarble off his feet as he lunged at him, wrapping his thick arms around the smaller boy's neck.

"Kakarot, take it easy, man," Vegeta warned.

The kid was too wound-up to acknowledge him directly but released his grip to take Tarble's hand instead and drag him toward the front door. "Come on! You're staying in my room!"

Vegeta dropped Tarble's backpack to the rug inside the bedroom, a modest space with just a queen-size bed in the center that faced a knotted pine dresser. The walls were decorated with Northwoods paintings of moose and bears and fiery lakeshore sunsets, and the whole space smelled like it was freshly constructed from the very trees where the house now stood.

"_You're_ sleeping with Raditz," Kakarot stated. A fat finger dismissed Vegeta across the hall as if to say they no longer required the seventeen-year-old's assistance, and it was time he moved along.

Vegeta groaned. The couch seemed far preferable to sharing a bed with that pubescent, sweaty jockstrap.

Until yesterday, this visit to the Briefs' cabin had been written into his summer calendar as something far different. Technically, Tarble was the one invited to spend the weekend on a playdate with his cousin, and Vegeta, as anxious as he was about letting the kid out of his sight, had been eager for a few days to be alone at home—for once completely alone and free to stay up until the wee hours of the morning binging on action films, free to eat meals when he wanted that were more riveting than grilled cheese or mac and cheese or anything to do with cheese, free to spend the afternoons in open circuits or spars at the gym, and binge Vonnegut novels in the evening, then online gaming until his eyes burned for sleep.

The shitstorm that raged in their kitchen after he'd put Tarble to bed was unexpected, but only for his part. Vegeta tried to be the bigger person at first, never one to test his father's rage. The old man's temper was turnkey, easy and full-service, all his truths forever hidden behind expensive scotch that he consumed with pathological measure and breakable dishes that were flung at Vegeta's head, and where normally, he'd give in, do anything to quiet his old man's predictable fury rather than chance Tarble waking up to hear them, he didn't this time. Vegeta threw back, just the lid of a pot pan like a frisbee, nothing serious. It rang like a gong against the cupboard behind his father's shoulder, and it was enough to find the skin of his cheek breaking beneath the hard edge of the man's knuckles.

All of it was so petty and selfish. Their father was rarely home, and of course, of all the weekends Vegeta and Tarble spent alone, this was the one he chose to commandeer at the last second—his plans having suddenly changed thanks to a new woman of the week. Vegeta was evicted, forced to tag along to this place until Sunday when their father would be gone again on the opposite side of the country with Congress back in session. Good fucking riddance.

Crossing the hall to the opposite bedroom, he was relieved to see that it was twice as big as the younger boys' with separate twin beds and two dressers made from the same rustic decor. Raditz's bag was already exploded over one of them. He'd no more than sluffed his own bag against the mattress when the two kids darted past the doorway and down the hall in a blur of clamoring voices and bare feet that slapped against the hardwoods.

Vegeta trailed them into the main living space and watched as Kakarot hefted open the sliding glass door that led to a covered porch facing the lake just wide enough to squeeze himself through.

As humble as the abode appeared on the outside, the panorama of plate glass windows that stretched wall-to-wall from the kitchen to the adjacent living room were tastefully elegant. Privacy wasn't much of a concern with a thick canopy of trees that parted just enough to frame the glassy water.

Vegeta made a small lap with his head cocked up to trace the knotted beams of the coffered ceiling. The main floor where he stood was a single, bright open room. A big screen TV hung above the fireplace like a dark portrait opposite the kitchen, and a sectional couch sat against the staircase and jutted toward the porch as the only medium to separate the spaces.

Raditz was propped against the porch railing unflappably still with his chin braced on his knuckles when Vegeta stepped through the door Kakarot hadn't bothered to close and sidled up to him. Though silent indignation was a treatment he expected from his cousin by now, as he followed Raditz's concentrated gaze to the dock, he realized he wasn't being ignored so much as sidelined by the true source of the teen's unbreakable study. The fifteen-year-old was ogling the Briefs' daughter who was laid out on the sundeck at the back of the speedboat in a yellow string bikini. Her posture suggested she knew she was being watched as one long, glistening leg bent up on pointed toes and an arm stretched out behind her causing the small of her back to arch just slightly off the flat, vinyl bench.

Even from a distance, it was obvious that much about the heiress had changed over the years. While she always strove to be the center of attention, she was a far cry from the tomboy of their youth who ran around fancy parties in grease-stained coveralls, her blue hair unbrushed and frizzed around her head like some mad scientist. Now she was quite uncovered… all curves and legs, and greased-up skin, with those blue locks tied back at the top of her head in a long ponytail.

"I'd hit that," his cousin said without blinking.

"Tch… You're a pervert. And she's out of your league."

"Yeah, no thanks to you. Besides, some women like younger men."

Vegeta ignored the accusation. With Raditz entering high school in the fall, his distaste for Vegeta and his reputation had become more contemptuously blatant, to the point that Raditz was denying their relation to his prospective football team in an attempt to distance himself and get in good with the douchebags from the start. Not that he wouldn't anyway; those idiots were practically pining after the thick lug, who, at a guess, was six-foot-one and pushing one-sixty. He'd skip JV and end up a varsity lineman out of the gates, which made lying to them almost as pointless as it was dumb, considering that Shenron Academy was a small school attended by the children of the city's elite whose pedigrees were public record. Not to mention uncle Bardock was his father's chief of staff, and they were together in almost every mandatory familial appearance.

The younger boys had cut down the lawn to the lake's edge, shrieking as they dipped their toes to test the water. Their incoherent shouts of jubilance and splashing feet caught the attention of the bathing beauty, who sat up, carefully holding the undone straps of her top to avoid flashing them. She smiled, an expression he recalled so vividly, as it was Bulma's default, that his mind rerendered the gap that time and distance had created to make it seem as if she was standing right in front of him. His stomach clenched and his mind flooded with such confused dread and longing that he half considered hiding in the house before she could spot him. Maybe they'd been friends years ago, or at the very least acquaintances of a similar age and similar disgust on his part, ambivalence on hers, toward the slimy tender in which the adults around them exchanged favors, but it was different now. With his mother gone and with Tarble, everything had changed, leaving Vegeta vulnerable to a person who'd once been somewhat of an unpredictable ally. Not that he needed or wanted to reacquaint himself with Bulma Briefs, but nonetheless, as he watched her make her way down the dock, he found himself mildly curious to learn who'd she'd become.

* * *

Bulma worshipped the sun with an almost religious fanaticism. She was a summer child and was, therefore, dependently composed by the celestial body and required it as much as air to truly thrive; at least that's what her mother always asserted, trying to soothe her in diaphanous, daydreamy tones whenever winter came around and Bulma came undone. Ridiculous as she believed her mother's mysticism to be, it was impossible to debunk. Everything about the sun stirred her mind and body in congruous, spiritual fervor. The way its heat hugged her skin at high noon provoked every cell to energize or, depending on her mood, subdued them to peaceful laziness. The way its aura painted the sky in a brilliant spectacle, whether it was coming or going, stoked a kind of romantic sentimentalism that was levitating. The sun was her longest and most beloved friend, her only one for that matter.

As it beat upon her closed eyelids, even through the dark lenses of her shades, she was content. She loved the silky texture of sunscreen slathered over her skin and lifted a leg to trace her toes along the smooth calf of the other.

That's when the excitable voices of children in the yard stirred her to wake from a hazy stupor and convert the condition almost instantaneously to meet them. Tarble had arrived, the younger sibling of her childhood crush. Through roundabout logic, the idea of him being in her care for the weekend felt like a chimerical drawstring that tethered her to his older brother, who she hadn't seen for more than five years but cooked up more fantasies about than she could fit in an entire bookcase of locked diaries.

Many wistful sunsets were spent in elaborate daydreams where Vegeta would appear below her bedroom balcony to beg her favor, his deep voice rumbling up from the yard in desperate, yet perfectly iambic measure to express his undying love, and she'd be so taken by his poetic decrees and the way the sun's orange glow cast handsome shadows across his face that she'd hastily, foolishly climb over the rails to reach him. She'd always slip, a dramatic chance of death, but, of course, he'd catch her in his arms and hold her tightly against his chest, scolding her with passionate lament, and only when she'd swear that she was unharmed would he set her to her feet without loosening his grip around her frame. Just as her toes felt the brush of grass beneath them, his nose would nudge her face, tipping it toward him just so. His dark gaze would hold hers with longing, and he would drop any chivalrous pretense, overcome by raw need to take her lips in the deepest, most beautiful, heart-wrenching kiss.

The habitual scene played out in her mind as she held the straps of her bikini with one hand and unglued herself from the boat's vinyl deck to greet the tiny boy at the opposite end. He was so small and skinny, less than a year younger than Kakarot, but half his size, which should have confirmed the sickly rumors if he weren't bursting with wild energy, chasing his cousin through the shallow water.

"Hello, Tarble!" Bulma called.

"Hi!" the boy absently shouted behind him before manners stopped his chase and he spun around to offer his attention. "Do you live here?"

With his thick black hair, sharp cheekbones and an impish smile showing his straight, white teeth, he looked like Vegeta, but the cheery way his voice pitched as he greeted her gave an impression of gentle friendliness that was a complete inversion of what she remembered of his brother.

"In the summer, I do. I'm Bulma."

"Oh!" A spurt of recognition that she didn't quite know what to make of passed over the kid's face, and his follow-up confused her further when he said, "Thank you for inviting us!"

_Us?_ The connotation of the word alone was enough to trigger her heart to race, and it's confirmation as she looked across the lawn to see Vegeta staring back from the porch all but collapsed her legs out from under her and left her struggling to contain the stunned, almost breathless fit that was quickly stealing her composure. She raced up the lawn in wide, bounding strides, only slowing her gait the last few yards to repress her excitement, not wanting to appear too eager.

The last time they were together was New Year's Eve more than five years ago, the night her wild crush on him tipped toward obsession. Without the smuggled glass of champagne, she wouldn't have had the nerve to pop an unsuspecting kiss on his lips at midnight. Chaste and innocent as it was, Vegeta came completely undone, his usually stoic features slacked as he stared back with wide open eyes, pupils saccading back and forth in panic. His entire face blushed with such severe discomfiture that he fled, darted down the hallway and disappeared. She hadn't seen him since and assumed he'd had been avoiding her, until now.

She climbed the short steps to greet him, unable to crush her idiotic grin when Vegeta took her in with an almost imperceivable flit of his pupils over her frame. Even being caught in such a modest appraisal caused a pinkish tint to suffuse across his face with the same distressed look he'd given her at the party, and he quickly turned his gaze toward the boys in the water.

He was more attractive than she remembered. Though he hadn't gotten any taller, he was all compact muscle underneath a tight Shenron Academy boxing club tee that strained around his biceps as he crossed his arms. A fresh gash across his cheekbone and reddened eye somehow lent validity to this new, broody bad boy image he'd adopted. He'd always been shy, but now that he was cut like a Roman god, his shyness seemed a bit orchestrated. His posture was stiff as one of those Renaissance statues, the twitch of his biceps against the fabric of his t-shirt being the only discernible difference between himself and one of Michelangelo's sculpted ornaments. There was no way in hell Vegeta was the same scared boy who ran from her lips like a Medieval prince fleeing the plague. She imagined he had dozens of Shenron Academy debutants flattering his every move, or even a girlfriend, the fresh thought of which made her only more determined to try to reignite their prepubescent flame, feeling a strange ownership over the guy, like they were destined.

"Help a girl out, will you?" Bulma stepped toward him and spun around to wag the straps of her suit. "Come on now, don't be shy! Wouldn't want this thing falling off to flash you guys."

"That'd be fine with me!" said Raditz.

The perverted teen's comment wasn't acknowledged with more than a scrunch of her nose.

She shook the straps again, and still a long, almost soul-crushing moment passed before she felt them pull and the rough skin of his fingers brush against the nape of her neck as he tied them.

Bulma swung back to quickly hook an arm with his, tightening her grip around the crook of his elbow when she felt his muscles tense in an attempt to pull away.

"Come on, I'll give you the grand tour," she said, trying to march him into the house, but after two reluctant steps, his feet ground to a halt.

"Raditz, watch them!" Vegeta spat over his shoulder. His voice still held a rasp, but had fallen an octave since she'd heard it last; less hollow, it was now rich and soulful.

"Remember the last time I saw you?"

"Not really," he said; though the blush that returned to his cheeks belied the claim.

"My parents New Year's Eve party ring any bells?" Bulma grinned, goading him. "Your father was hitting on my mother all night."

"_Tch_. It was the other way around."

"Was it? Well, who can blame her? You're dad's a DILF."

"Egh!" He yanked his arm from her grip, and an expression of the utmost indignation twisted across his face.

The sudden shift in mood diverted her plan to bring up their own kiss. He hadn't unwound any over the years, especially where his father was concerned. Calling the man hot was a mistake, like salt in a gangrenous wound, though she never understood why. The senator was a charmer.

Bulma changed the subject, absently flapping a hand around the open living and kitchen area where they stood. "I assume you've seen this all already. I'll show you upstairs."

* * *

The large wall of windows in the master bedroom met the peak of the house's A-frame and overlooked the lake. Vegeta watched Raditz wrestle the kids playfully in the shallows, their shrill squeals permeating through the panes as he pretended to play the predator.

"Your brother is really cute. He looks like a miniature version of you."

"He's alright," Vegeta said.

The girl's punishing, extrovertive nature was the same as he remembered, except now that she'd physically matured, it had taken on a libidinous flavor. Even casual conversation was marked by the proximity with which she stood brushing against his shoulder.

As he stepped back and glanced around the room once more, the vacancy of the space suddenly became apparent, like an unused hotel suite. No suitcases were belched open in the corners or personal items littered across the dressers.

"When are your parents arriving?"

From what he understood, the Briefs would be supervising. There was no conceivable way his Aunt Gine and Uncle Bardock would let their kids spend the weekend alone, solely in the care of the Briefs' feckless daughter. Perhaps that's the real reason he was forced to tag along. Or more likely, Aunt Gine and Uncle Bardock simply had no idea that the Briefs' cut town, being the type to do so on a whim.

Doctor and Mrs. Briefs were self-absorbed and mostly absent; though it didn't seem to bother the girl. Raised by housekeepers and homeschooled by expensive tutors, Bulma had essentially been on her own, left to do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. The Briefs' daughter had a reputation for being a genius like her father, but supremely spoiled and a bit on the wild side, not to mention a gregarious flirt.

"They were invited to a soiree at Councilmen Ox's estate in Fire Mountain. Looks like you and I will be playing house this weekend."

Vegeta stifled a groan under the weight of her unctuous grin, knowing that the unpleasantness of the weekend had just been upgraded to a babysitting endeavor where he'd be responsible for four souls instead of one since Bulma was far too reckless to be helpful and likely needed supervision herself.

"Come on, last stop." She wrapped her arm around his; incapable of directing him down the hall with words alone, she sought an excuse to touch him.

Unlike the master bedroom, her own room was well lived in with clothes and toiletries strewn about the floor and an unmade bed. Vegeta stepped over the debris toward the same large, triangular windows that faced the back and stared out across acres of tall pines, spruces, and larches, an endless forest on the edge of the wilderness. He ignored the heiress's aimless prattle behind him over which bikini she should sport next, until he turned around to see that she was untying her current suit right in front of him.

"What the hell are you doing?" His hands jumped to cover his eyes as his mind calculated the probability that he'd make it out the door without tripping over something.

"Oh my god! You're such a prude. Just turn around for a second. I'll need help tying it up again."

A nervous resentment churned in his stomach as he waited for her instruction, affronted by the fact that she'd assume he was comfortable with such an obvious, lewd display. Was she really going to undress in front of him? With shaking hands, he tied up her bikini—some hot pink push-up piece that she wore to flaunt her breasts. Kami, she was like an exaggerated caricature of the girl he'd once known, who by his measure, had always been intolerably forward. Now, it was unbearable, all sexualized, like she thought him some dog that would woof at the way she pulled the straps to test the buoyancy of her boobs against the knot he'd just been forced to fasten.

"Go get changed. We're gonna take the boat out to the sandbar. It's shallow, so the boys can swim."

That, Vegeta was surprised to comment, actually sounded like a good idea.

After he changed into swim trunks, he found Bulma in the kitchen rummaging in the fridge with her backside tipped out in his direction. Vegeta distracted himself, circling the kitchen island, tracing his fingers along the shaved stone countertop that, while it looked like the pebbly bottom of a creek bed, was surprisingly smooth to touch. A note was left by the coffee maker, penned to Bulma by their housekeeper, explaining in superfluous detail the extent of her grocery shopping, the location of household utilities and cleaning supplies that the heiress wouldn't bother to use, and a long list of emergency phone numbers.

"Are you allowed to be drinking?" he asked, observing her pour an ample amount of tequila and splash of orange juice into two large cups.

"Don't see anyone around to stop me." She glanced around the room mockingly. "Here," she said, thrusting a cup with a swirly straw at him.

Vegeta tucked his hands in his pockets and leaned away. "I don't drink."

"Never?" Bulma blinked and then rolled her eyes in a way that was expressly bothered when he shook his head no, like it was one more prudish mark to add to his list of hangups. "Fine. More for me, then!"

The four cousins and Bulma boarded the speed boat, and at just the moment Vegeta clicked the last buckle on Tarble's life vest, the idling engine shot to life and tore across the water, flinging the boy backward off his feet. Tarble stumbled up, groping Vegeta's arm for leverage; a smile lit across his face as the wind swept back his hair. Kakarot howled from the opposite bench like it was some theme park ride, the straps of his undone vest lashing out behind him. Vegeta shouted at the boy over the headwind to demand he secure it.

Raditz sipped on Bulma's extra tequila drink from his periphery, and though Vegeta knew he should scold him too, he was tired of hollering and resolved to pick and choose his battles. Caring for the two kids, hoping they didn't fly out of the boat at every wake Bulma crashed into was enough of a job at the present moment.

A line of boats dotted the distance, anchored off the shore of an uninhabited island in the middle of the lake where tree branches twisted over the water's edge. As they glided in among them across the shallow water, it didn't take more than a cursory glance at the other boats that were filled with high school and college-aged kids shouting over booming bass beats with drinks in their hands to understand that the heiress had, at the very least, misinformed the scene.

The anchor he dropped into the shallow water displaced a rusted beer can in a cloudy plume of sand. Why Bulma thought this would be a good idea with small children, besides the water's depth, Vegeta was left to wonder. Despite her genius reputation, Bulma was never known for her common sense, and apparently, nothing had changed over the years.

Vegeta's appetite for swimming was immediately soured, and a part of him debated whether to allow the boys to dip in this filth at all as he imagined the taint of piss and beer that stirred within the water. But he couldn't say no, not with the way they impatiently squirmed as he lathered them in sunblock, instructing them to raise their arms, trying to not miss any skin. He helped the kids down the ladder at the back of the boat before he made himself comfortable in the captain's chair with his book, watching them splash around from the corner of his eye.

A large cruiser pulled up to anchor alongside them, which in this crowded space was only a few feet from their boat. There was a whoop of riotous voices, and Vegeta recognized, even in silhouette against the late afternoon sun, the boat's three occupants. They attended his academy. Tien and Yamcha were on the football and baseball teams, Yamcha being both a star quarterback and pitcher. Launch, Tien's girlfriend was the most popular girl at their high school, and Vegeta hated her most of all. The girl was a life-size Barbie, tall and thin with flowing blonde hair, a snobbish bitch who bemused herself with brutal, often carefully plotted debasement of those around her.

Vegeta's jaw slacked in shock when they cheerily shouted Bulma's name, waving her over to their boat. They were friends?

"Are you coming?" Bulma asked.

"Not a chance in hell."

"Oh come on, Vegeta! Don't be a party pooper," she leaned over him with her breasts expertly squeezed between her arms.

"Go ahead. I'll just be guarding the lives of the innocents."

An amused, incredulous expression smirched across her face, as if she thought he was making a joke and would eventually follow. Bulma shrugged before she disembarked, drink in hand, and waded through the water to climb up the ladder of the other boat, where she was helped aboard by Yamcha. Raditz followed, a dimwitted puppy at her heels.

* * *

Bulma took Yamcha's hand and stepped onto the woven vinyl flooring of the deck, feeling her mood lighten at the welcome of her newfound friends.

After sixteen years as an only child—discounting her older sister who was nearly twice her age and lived on the opposite side of the world—she'd never had much opportunity to meet peers her own age. She was homeschooled by world-renowned tutors, who despite their credentials were exhaustively, humiliatingly vetted by her father. The man was the smartest person on Earth, according to his accolades. If his big brains weren't enough to bloat his head, that every scientific journal begged him to cover stories and every accredited institution bestowed him awards certainly accomplished the job. He wasn't going to let just anyone educate his children. It took years of groveling, hissy fits, and cold shoulders to wear him down. But finally, her father surrendered, and this fall she would be attending an actual high school.

It was just her luck that she'd encountered Launch, Yamcha and Tien a few weeks ago out on the sandbar; she never went back to the city and resolved to spend the whole summer at the cabin, ecstatic that these kids were the very same that would be her classmates when school started in the fall. The well-to-do teens whose families also owned cabins on the prestigious lake where the Briefs' spent their summers would ensure that she was popular and well liked among the student population from day one. After meeting them, her anxiety over enrolling in school had somewhat faded.

She suppressed the flicker of guilt for leaving Vegeta behind to care for the kids, but didn't have long to grapple with the fact when, before she'd even found her footing, Launch yanked her roughly by the elbow.

"Question sweetheart. What is _Vegeta_ doing with you?" the girl inquired in a tone overwhelmingly laced by shocked contempt.

"He's staying with me." Bulma grinned, pretending not to catch the air in which Launch spat his name, and instead tried to flip it with a coy wag of her eyebrows. He was ungodly hot, and Launch of all people had to recognize the fact… right?

"Oh honey, please don't tell me you _like_ him," said Launch pitifully, pouting her bottom lip.

"Why not?"

Yamcha bounced into the conversation. Popping a cap from the two beer bottles that were entwined between his fingers, he handed one to Bulma. "Let me give you a little lesson on Shenron Academy's resident asshole. Dude is a royal prick. Thinks his shit don't stink because his daddy is a senator."

"He's the val-DICK-torian," Tien added.

Raditz snorted up his drink, and Bulma shot him a cold glare. Was there something wrong with being smart? She wasn't so sure she could hide her intelligence to avoid becoming a social outcast if that was the measure by which popularity was dolled out at the city's most prestigious academy. "I've known him for years. The senator's a family friend. He's always been a little shy."

"_Shy!_" Launch reeled. "He's not shy, he's a psycho! Beats the shit out of people just for making eye contact. He's been suspended so many times, I'm actually impressed he's still top of the class."

"Probably just threatens nerds into doing his homework," Tien added.

"He doesn't have any friends, except for maybe that gorilla, Nappa. But Nappa graduated last spring, so I guess Veggie is all alone next year. Unless you'd like to join his corner." Launch tipped her gaze to Raditz, who shook his head adamantly in the negative.

"Raditz, he's your cousin!" Bulma whacked the dolt. "I think this is all just a misunderstanding. You guys just have to get to know him. He's really nice to me."

"Probably just wants to get in your pants," Tien said.

"That's not true! Hold my beer." Tien's assertion was so laughable that Bulma felt obligated to prove them all wrong. She climbed down the ladder and waded back to the boat. If he'd just come and hang out for a bit, they would see it. As prickly and aloof as Vegeta was, in equal measure, he was just as sweet and darkly funny, if they would just give him the chance and get to know him.


	2. Popsicle

**Chapter 2: Popsicle**

Vegeta slipped off his t-shirt and lay reading across the boat's sundeck. The roasting sun beat against his skin, which pebbled with sweat that began to trail down his neck and back in small, tickling rivulets. The boys bobbed in the water on the opposite side, and though he couldn't see them from this vantage, he tuned a surveillant ear to their voices as he read—a bit pleased when Tarble followed Kakarot's absurd babble about freshwater sharks and giant serpents long as the boat and thick as Raddy's thighs by quipping, "Don't be so stupid, Kat."

More and more, their father's practical intelligence was showing on the boy, a trait Vegeta had inherited too, and which thankfully, was one of the man's better qualities. Tarble would perhaps get the best of both of them. Despite the pitiable state of his health in the first few years of his life, Tarble was impossibly buoyant and endlessly sweet—their mother writ all over him. Vegeta loathed to remember that he'd ever felt burdened resentment for the kid even just a few years ago, preferring to relegate those feelings as nothing more than hazy dreams from a fake life, because now that Tarble had grown to develop all the intricate detailings of a full-fledged person, he was one Vegeta quite liked, perhaps the only one.

Though the little jab of pride he'd been smirking about behind the pages of his book was quickly soured when Vegeta heard his name hissed from the queen bee's lips. He tried to brush it off, but he couldn't focus anymore and found himself staring at, or rather through, the pages—not that he should care what they thought of him.

His name often traveled the halls of their high school in the third person, snide commentary delivered at an intentional volume. He didn't care, not really. Cliquey high school drama was never a problem unless directly provoked, which happened more often than he'd like to admit. The disappointment from his teachers he could swallow. The shakes of their heads as they tried to guilt him into feeling remorse through inane claims about a smart boy's squandered potential were only fortuitous when they insisted on relaying these incidences to his father, and he'd miss a week of classes to 'illness' while he healed from the only brand of discipline the man knew how to serve.

With his ear carefully dialed to the voices in the next boat, he listened to Bulma defending him out of sheer ignorance. Not attuned to the social cues of a premiere prep academy, the homeschooled heiress laughed off her friends with mock scorn and went so far as to claim, or at least insinuate that she _liked_ him—the idea of which, true or not, left his stomach unsettled with a kind of complicated dread. If he'd been confronted by her claim face-to-face in any other moment, he might have been regretfully flattered and, maybe, capable of dodging it with a sugar-coated explanation of his circumstances, but not now. Their pitiful laughter burned his ears, and he stuffed his nose into the book to hide his reddened face and take solace in the musky scent of its pages.

A nearby splash had Vegeta peeking from behind the cover to see Bulma wade back to the boat, beer in hand. As she climbed the ladder behind him, his face was so stiff with embarrassment that he couldn't move and continued to stare blearily at the lines of text, wondering why she'd come. But instead of the voice he expected to pipe with some shrill demand, he felt her weight settle over his hips, and his eyes grew wide as he realized the girl had straddled him from the back. Vegeta darted his head over his shoulder to where the heiress sat atop him, grinning as she rubbed her palms together.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Your back is burning, idiot. You didn't put on any sunscreen." She began to run her lotion drenched palms over his back. Not for his health, he guessed, but to make some sort of statement to her so-called friends.

God, he hated it. He felt like a pawn, like she was trying to prove some point to them that she didn't care what they thought of him or that they've got him all wrong. They didn't have him all wrong, Vegeta knew. He _was_ a social pariah. He didn't have any friends because he didn't _want_ any friends. All their feigned pleasantries, if one weren't completely void of common sense, were poorly veiled and politically motivated in a kind of tit-for-tat. They wanted their homework completed, their essays written, and their test answers delivered by some sap who was naive enough to think the currency, an invitation to their posse, worth the trouble. Even without caring for Tarble and the ominous stress of plotting their future, keeping up his own grades, and boxing after school, Vegeta had far too much pride to degrade himself for those idiots.

"I think it's about covered." He bucked a bit, hoping she'd take the hint. Her massage was only making the situation so much worse. An unmistakable rush of blood began to fill between his legs as she knit the muscles of his back, digging in with the perfect mix of pressure to break-up the tissues and tingling, light strokes of her fingertips to smooth them back out.

"All done," she chirped. She hopped off his hips, and her palm came down on his ass with a hearty slap that jumped his nerves. "Come on! Just hang out for five minutes, that's all I'm asking."

"Fuck off, Bulma, seriously." Even if his dick wasn't as stiff as a popsicle, he would still say no.

"You're a real boner sometimes, you know that?"

Vegeta didn't respond, afraid any more words to leave his throat would escape with the obvious croak of his distress. Here he was, stuck to suffer with his dick throbbing between his legs and his face buried in his arms, mumbling muffled curses between them until she gave up and went back to the other boat.

After another hour spent pretending to read, his eyes glazed over the same paragraph on repeat while he split his attention between the boys, to make sure Kakarot didn't drown Tarble by accident, and the fools in the other boat, listening for his name. They stopped harping on him after a while and moved on to ridiculing the rest of the student body, before finally, the drunken morons exhausted their mouths and decided it was time to go, a plan Vegeta would have been relieved by if they didn't suggest to all return to the cabin with them.

Vegeta threw his two cents into the debate, knowing that his aunt and uncle would not approve of the teens hosting an unsupervised party, especially with the young boys present. But more than that, he was loathe to spend one more minute with the academy's resident assholes. Hell, over the past two hours they made fun of him within earshot, in front of his dickhead cousin no less, and even for someone with his thick skin, his self-esteem had dropped to a new low.

Bulma was tipsy enough to brush off his protests as she climbed back into the boat, calling him names—lame, stuck-up, buzz-kill—in mimicry of his peers. That dipshit, Yamcha followed up the ladder behind her, practically licking his lips as he stared at the two round cheeks of her ass that were directly in front of his face.

Bulma went for the keys, but Vegeta snatched them out of her hands.

He drove the boat back across the lake at a reasonable speed, fighting the urge to move faster as he was forced to watch the dipshit QB pull Bulma into his lap. In a slick motion as they crossed another boat's wake, he purposely spilled his beer on her tits and apologized dumbly for the rough water as he used his bare hand to brush the liquid from her chest. Bulma laughed off his groping with a kind of ditzy, drunken ignorance, as if she really believed the act, which was the most deplorable part of it all.

The young boys at least proved to be useful distractions, and Vegeta let Tarble and Kakarot take turns steering the boat. Tarble whooped and hollered as he propped himself in the captain's seat, perched high on his knees to see over the steering wheel, and Vegeta focused on that as his modest reward for putting up with this weekend at all. He couldn't deny that the kid deserved every minute because by now, he'd give his own life just to see Tarble happy. Even the stupid, feral grin on his goofy cousin Kakarot was some consolation.

Bulma and her friends continued to drink and party on the open porch, blaring shitty hip-hop from the living room sound system that was nothing but the vocoded whines of a bunch of posers that couldn't actually sing, but that his classmates danced and sang to with equal incompetence. Vegeta grilled cheeseburgers for the kids on the opposite end of the long porch—sans burger for Tarble who'd recently become something of a vegetarian. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to forcibly smother the beat of his pulse against his temples only to pop them open again when a bottle of beer slammed down against the edge of the grill.

Yamcha looked down at him, an amused smirk pulled over his lips. "So, Bulma Briefs, huh? Didn't think you had it in you."

Was that supposed to be a question? Even if Vegeta had a response ready to spit at whatever Yamcha seemed to be insinuating, he wouldn't validate the prick by saying it. He flipped the meat and watched the flames ignite and spray fresh grease across the grates, unheeded by the fool.

"Do you really think you stand a chance cause you were kiddy pals back in the day?" Of course, the moron wasn't going to take his silence for an answer. He twirled the lip of his beer bottle between his thumb and forefinger, feigning indifference as he waited for Vegeta to reply.

Vegeta cleared his throat to utter, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Ha! Bullshit!" Yamcha's voice rose with a hint of contempt before he glanced over his shoulder as if to conceal the fact that he was speaking to Vegeta at all. He wrangled in his volume and leaned to meet Vegeta's ear. "If I were you, I'd save myself the heartache and forget about her. She won't want anything to do with you when she figures out what you're really like."

It was obvious; he was trying to provoke him, force him to showcase his notorious temper. As much as Vegeta wanted to hit him, could feel the unmistakable pressure pulsing through his clenched fists, he wouldn't dare indulge the urge in front of them, Tarble especially. Besides, whatever Yamcha thought he wanted couldn't be further from the truth. He didn't want to date Bulma Briefs. He wasn't even sure that he wanted to be friends with the heiress. Whatever flame these people seemed to believe was lit between them wasn't anything more than a childish fantasy. The only thing Vegeta truly wanted was to be left alone.

He ate with the boys in the kitchen, trying to drown out the crappy beats and aggravated tension that refused to settle in his veins by distracting himself with Kakarot's tale of some treehouse in the forest. The kid spoke about the structure with wild gestures; bits of hamburger spat from his open mouth as he described every extraneous detail, down to the damn shingles. Tarble begged to see it, but the sun was already dipping below the horizon, and from what Kakarot described, the place was a trek, nestled deep in the woods. Vegeta promised they'd scope out the treehouse in the morning and bribed away their whines with the suggestion of campfire smores.

The kids ran around the lawn to collect kindling and stuffed the twigs between the logs that Vegeta stacked in alternating squares like a log cabin. Once he got the flames roaring, it was a full-time job helping them roast marshmallows without ruining them.

The boys squealed when they'd set their marshmallows aflame and were forced to scrape the charred remains against the rocks around the fire and begin again with a fresh one. Kakarot tore through half the bag, burning every damned one, but it seemed less like discoordination than his cousin's inner pyromaniac. He laughed like a little psychopath and waved the flaming marshmallows over his head, letting the goo drip down the stick, sparks and ash spraying from his sugary torches.

Tarble, however, stared intently into the fire with his marshmallow hovering just out of reach of the licking flames, turning the stick ever so slowly. As he pulled it out to examine it, a grin stretched across his face. After countless tries, he'd finally roasted the most perfect, golden marshmallow, and looked up at Vegeta with his chin tipped up proudly.

"Nice work, dude," Vegeta said, readying the graham crackers and chocolate.

Tarble placed the end of the stick against the graham and watched with his tongue flicking out the side of his mouth as Vegeta placed the other on top. He pulled the stick out and dropped it at his feet to trade for the smore. But instead of taking a bite, he only turned the treat in his hands with a thoughtful examination, like there was some deeper meaning in his work of art, then looked up at Vegeta with the same expression. The kid was deep, and often Vegeta was left to decode his mannerisms, because Tarble would never clue him in on what he was thinking whenever he left Planet Earth, as Vegeta described his odd, far-away moments—nothing beyond the bits he thought Vegeta would want to hear, like he was censoring himself, in a way, like he was feeling all the same dark, leftover thoughts, but he didn't want to influence Vegeta to brood anymore than he already constantly brooded.

Tarble mutely climbed into Vegeta's lap, an arm wound around his neck, and held the smore to his lips. "You first."

"Whatever you say." Vegeta sunk his teeth into the thing.

He licked the gooey remnants from his lips, and Tarble laid his head into the crook of Vegeta's neck to nibble at the rest. All of the boy's energy was quickly sapped after the long, eventful day, and he was unable to finish even half of the perfect smore. Struggling to keep his eyelids open, he let the thing plop into his lap.

Kakarot's boundless energy was finally waning too. He sat cross-legged, wiping his sticky fingers in the grass only to have them covered in dirt and blades. The boy held his messy palms before his face, and Vegeta watched the slow gears turn in the idiot's head before he began to lick the grime from them.

"Egh! Kakarot, no!" he scolded him like a naughty dog, which wasn't far off. The boy stopped and looked up at him with round, dopey eyes and a face covered in dirt. "Get up. It's time for bed."

Vegeta carried his sleeping brother into the cabin with Kakarot trailing close behind. After tucking Tarble into bed, he directed his cousin into the bathroom to clean him up before putting him to bed too.

Just one last pain in the ass was left, and Vegeta groaned knowing that Raditz wasn't going to be quite so easy to handle.

* * *

Bulma swayed between the soles of her flip flops, feeling the alcohol take its toll on her coordination, but it didn't stop her from grabbing the beer Yamcha extended in her direction. She'd nurse it, like the last one. Saying no would only make her seem lame, and she already had a lot to prove.

Making friends her age, she thought would be easy, at least easier than the politics of traded favors with which the adults around her determined who their 'friends' were. And it _was_ easy, at first. Launch, Tien and Yamcha were welcoming, accommodating, and their excitement learning that she'd enrolled in their junior class felt genuine. Sure, they had years of inside jokes and often derailed for hours reminiscing tales that were difficult to keep up with, not knowing any of the characters or their backstories. Yamcha would always apologize for boring her, needlessly, because she wasn't the least bit bored. Their retellings of high school dramas were as entertaining as a daytime soap. She lived vicariously through them, almost felt a part of them, and every story was a dossier that offered her insight into the students and teachers with whom she'd soon be sharing the halls.

But then Vegeta arrived. Bulma didn't know he was coming; she was blindsided the moment she saw him on the porch. And while she was head-over-heels, Disney-princess-level thrilled to see him again, the others sort of butchered the bliss. They'd turned her excitement into anxiety. All the faceless people that starred in their stories were just that; she didn't feel bad about them because she didn't know them. But with Vegeta, suddenly the politics of high school cliques had become personal and increasingly difficult to manage. She didn't even know he attended the academy, and learning that he was a misfit, while it wasn't entirely surprising considering how aloof he was as a kid, she knew they were wrong about him. Now all of their stories about their other classmates felt tainted. While it was clear that these kids liked her now, the way they gossiped about everyone else with such ruthless abandon, today Vegeta being the topic of scrutiny, she worried if one wrong move could condemn her to social oblivion before her first day, and if she wasn't careful, she'd be the next one to star in their juicy narratives.

All summer long, Launch and the boys reigned compliments on her like she was a goddess, and Bulma couldn't help but give in to their flattery. More than anything, she wanted to fit in with teens her own age. But she liked Vegeta, and despite their warnings that by associating with him, she was committing social suicide, she was reluctant to listen. They were still harping on him now, telling her to avoid him like the plague if she knew what was good for her, which, considering these were the very people who ran the popularity contest, almost felt like a threat.

"I think he's gay," Yamcha went on, "I mean, have you seen wrestling? It's pretty homoerotic if you ask me."

"I'm pretty sure he's a boxer," Bulma said. She knew for a fact that he was because she read it on his t-shirt, but she didn't want to appear like she was correcting the star quarterback. At the same time, even if Vegeta was gay, what would that matter? But she knew that he wasn't, and for reasons beyond her drunken comprehension, she resolved to tell them so. "I know he's straight, because I kissed him once, and you should have seen his face."

Though she regretted the decision when she saw the three gaping holes of their mouths dropped open in a moment of shock before they erupted into a fury of expletive roars.

"Hold the goddamn phone!" Launch cried, shaking Bulma by the shoulders. "Explain!"

"It was New Year's Eve, five years ago, and I kissed him at midnight. What's to explain?"

"Uh… why?" asked Yamcha, his face puckered in disgust.

"I dunno. I always thought he was cute. I saw my mom kiss his dad, and I guess I just copied her. Anyway, it was nothing… just a peck. Technically, my first kiss."

"Oh, you poor thing. Never repeat that to anybody!" Launch demanded.

Bulma looked across the lawn to where Vegeta was sitting by the campfire, acting like he was allergic to human contact. He'd always been like that, like when she kissed him, and his face turned scarlet before he ran from her, and she suspected, vowed to never attend another Briefs' function. She couldn't understand why he was like that, why he took life so seriously and could never relax, act his age and exist among his peers. He always seemed a bit miserable, like he was depressed or something, and not because his mother died. He'd been that way forever, always over analyzing, internalizing every thought and action of the people around him to the point that if someone sneezed too close, he'd take it as a personal affront.

While the others dug in and continued to deride him, Bulma was stuck in a daze watching him at the campfire as he helped Kakarot and Tarble make smores, holding out graham crackers and chocolate for them to deposit their marshmallows.

Tarble climbed into Vegeta's lap and hugged one arm around his neck; in the other, he held out his smore. Vegeta took a messy bite. His thick arm was wrapped around the entirety of the kid's skinny frame, and as Tarble fell asleep, Vegeta's face tipped to burrow his nose in his hair like he was smelling it.

That sensitivity was one layer of him that the others refused to see. Instead, they only acknowledged the reclusive side of him that had, over the years, developed into a dickish defense. They called him an asshole and a psycho, claimed that his temper was legendary, triggered by the smallest slight. Maybe he was an asshole, but not inherently so. It seemed more like a cover, a kind of mismanagement of his insecurities.

As she watched him carry his brother inside, Kakarot trailing sleepily at his heels, Bulma started to feel a bit shitty. The others had moved on to mocking more classmates she didn't know, and she felt herself growing distracted as she stood among them sipping on her beer with nothing to contribute to the conversation. Their words had lost value now that she'd removed her blinders and could see what they were really worth. Craning her neck behind her toward the house, she wondered if Vegeta had gone to bed and felt compelled to find him.

Bulma excused herself from the porch and stepped through the sliding glass door. Shouts down the hall rang from the room the cousins were forced to share, and indeed, it was a scene she'd expected to see upon entering—the two were wound together, grabbing, pulling, smacking at each other's limbs as Vegeta tried to wrestle a bottle of rum from Raditz's fist. The bratty freshman, who was easily twice Vegeta's size, still struggled to play keep-away, cussing wildly when Vegeta managed to throw him to the floor, get on top and wrench his elbow in a direction the joint wasn't meant to move.

"Ach! You fucking asshole!" Raditz cried out; finally overcome by the pain, his fingers released their grip to let Vegeta tear the bottle away and jump nimbly back to his feet.

To say she wasn't impressed by how easily he'd taken Raditz down would have been a lie.

Red-faced and brooding, Raditz pushed himself off the floor to tower over Vegeta and spat, "My parents are going to hear about this. You could have dislocated my fucking elbow!"

"Go ahead. Tell 'em!" Vegeta called his bluff, shaking the half-drunk bottle before his cousin's face to drive the threat home.

Vegeta stormed past Bulma in the doorway in a cloud of rage, like he didn't see her. She followed him into the kitchen where he picked up the recycling bin, dropped the rum inside and began to swat at the empty beer bottles that were littered across the counter, along with whatever else she and her friends had concocted.

"You don't have to clean up my mess. I'll do it in the morning."

Vegeta didn't acknowledge that she was speaking; stuck in a mutinous sulk with his brows pinched together, he tossed the bin to the floor, letting the bottles clang angrily as it slid across the tiles. He jerked a rag from the counter and flipped on the sink to wet it.

"Come on, Vegeta. This isn't your job. Can you just relax? You don't have to be so perfect all the time."

He refused to look at her, like some inner protest, and as she stood at the edge of the kitchen watching him fastidiously clean, she felt a kind of resentment for him and his need to play the adult in her home. He won't let loose, not even a little, and instead was determined to torture himself.

"Bulma!" The muffled shout of her name came from the porch, and Yamcha slid the door open just wide enough to poke his head through. "Come on, we're going to Zarbon's."

They'd grown bored out in the lawn, and wanted to boat across the lake to the local bar, one favored by the youth thanks to its eponymous owner—a man who, despite hailing from the area, had a cultured, overrefined air about him and was notorious for serving drinks to the underage teens. Quite frankly the man gave Bulma the creeps, always eavesdropping on their conversations, leaning uncomfortably close across the bar with a synthetic smile stretched over his straight, white teeth.

But more than that, she felt guilt for abandoning Vegeta, his brooding agitation being read as something broader than the mere remnants of a fight with his cousin; she sensed she was partially responsible. Perhaps the fact that she hadn't helped much, or at all, with the kids goaded his anger.

"You guys go ahead. I think I'm gonna stay."

"Seriously?" Yamcha sneered. His eyebrow lifted skeptically, and he glanced toward Vegeta with a slightly miffed look. "He can come too, I guess." The invitation was extended indirectly through her in a tone so obvious in its reluctance that Vegeta let a cruel laugh slip from under his breath. He scrubbed the center island with a force, the muscles at his temple twitching in irritation.

"Sorry, Yamcha. I'm just really tired is all. Too much sun and fun, I guess. Catch you tomorrow?"

"Whatever. Fucking buzz kill." Yamcha slammed the door shut, leaving Bulma to wonder who the comment was directed toward. She hoped it wasn't her.

From the window she watched her friends run down the dock to untie their boat and zoom off across the glassy water before returning her attention to the angry storm behind her who was scraping half-eaten burgers into the garbage and flinging open the dishwasher to stuff dirty plates inside. He filled the sink with soapy water to wash the larger pieces by hand, and as Bulma picked up a drying cloth and quietly bellied up to the counter beside him, she sensed a shift in his demeanor, however slight, as he handed her grilling utensils one by one after he'd scrubbed them free of blackened grisel to a spotless silver sheen.

Conversation was a bit trying with the testiness of his mood that lingered in the room like damp air after a hard rain. As Bulma stared at his profile, she took a guess as to what topic might interest him and extended her fingers to brush lightly over the gash on his cheekbone that, earlier in the day had blended in with the reddened skin under his eye, but now contrasted sharply against a dark purple bruise.

"Did you lose a match yesterday?"

He sucked a sharp breath and jerked his head away the second she touched him, and with the same cat-like reflexes he'd used on Raditz, seized her tightly by the wrist.

"Don't!" he hissed with such venom and snap of his dark eyes to meet hers, that Bulma took a step back, as far as the short leash he'd formed would let her. Then just as fast, as if recognizing her fright, he let go, tossed her hand back at her. His focus returned to the sink as he slunk shamefaced, shaking his head he muttered, "Sorry... I just don't want to talk about it."

Of course he wouldn't. He was probably a sore loser that got all bent out of shape over one bad fight. But regardless, the way he turned on her was almost ferally triggered, and a part of her wondered if it was something more than a bad day at the gym, or if what her friends warned about him was true.

Bulma helped him finish scrubbing the kitchen to a spotless sheen in silence, cleaner than any of their housekeepers had ever kept it.

"It's still early," she said, trying once again to break the awkward tension and loosen him up. "Do you want to watch a movie?"

Maybe he felt guilty for scaring her, but regardless of his motivation, she was pleased to see the indifferent shrug of his shoulders. It wasn't a no.


	3. Summer Rain

**Chapter 3: Summer Rain**

Vegeta was mortified. His lack of self-control had sent the heiress to startle, to shuffle back from him, wide-eyed and flinched in fear, an expression with which he was intimately familiar, having worn it himself more times than he could count. Perhaps Yamcha was right, and his true nature was impossible to circumvent, hopelessly genetic. More and more, it seemed the harder he tried to be the opposite, to channel his disquieted temper into an organized sport, he was still becoming his father.

Her suggestion of a movie, at the very least, would give him time to cool off, to relax in her presence, prove to them both he was capable of such a thing, and grow tired. Bulma told him to find one on-demand while she tiptoed up the stairs toward her bedroom to change into pajamas.

Scrolling through the endless selection that was laid out in alphabetical order, he'd barely gotten to the 'B's' before he grew annoyed by the endeavor and settled on _Blow_, a film he hadn't seen for a few years, but remembered being decent.

"Oh, I've never seen it, but I love Johnny Depp!" Bulma chirped as she skipped down the stairs into the living room in a pair of short-shorts and a thin, white tank top. She wasn't wearing a bra, and Vegeta quickly tore his eyes away from her nipples which showed hard through the sheer material of her shirt. Did she dress this way on purpose? His question was answered when she pounced onto the couch and shimmied up against him without any concept of personal space.

"Drink this," he said, grabbing his bottle of water from the coffee table.

After being out in the sun all day guzzling alcohol like some tailgating floozy, she was probably still drunk, and only proved it when she made a dramatic show of his request by sticking out her tongue at him as she unscrewed the cap before she guzzled the whole bottle in one go, letting half of its contents dribble from the corners of her lips and drip down her chin.

Vegeta ignored her to watch the opening credits, which hadn't finished rolling before the heiress was cuddling up to his side, wrapping her arms around one of his as she laid her head against his shoulder. Vegeta stiffened uncomfortably, his cheeks hot and flushed, but he couldn't push her off, not without reminding them both of his earlier outburst. He tried to abstract himself from reality, to focus on the film, but even after the first forty minutes, he couldn't manage to enforce a single nerve to unclench from rigor mortis with the girl pressed up against him, fidgeting restlessly. On top of it, she wouldn't stop talking, asking inane questions about a fairly straightforward plot that the prodigal genius was too drunk to follow.

"If you'd shut up and watch, you wouldn't have to ask questions," he chided.

Bulma huffed and scooted further down into the couch, her head slipping from where it'd been tenuously braced against his flexed arm to plop more comfortably, for her at least, in his lap. Vegeta feigned a kind of unaffected hubris, staring ahead at the screen, refusing to acknowledge the pretty head that squirmed in his lap. It only lasted so long before she was back to forcing him to pay her attention.

"Did you pick _Blow_ because you want one?" she asked. Her face was turned up at him with a wicked grin smeared over her features.

Huh? Vegeta didn't understand what she meant and stared down at her blankly. Was she asking if he wanted to do drugs? Their parents were shameless enough about it that it wouldn't surprise him if she'd had the opportunity to test them. Hell, he even knew some of the hiding places where his own dad stashed contraband, and he would have flushed the shit too if he cared about the old man's well being enough to face the repercussions. His face puzzled down at her coy expression, hoping to gods it wasn't what she meant because he'd rather tear his brother out of bed right now and show up unannounced at home to meet whatever consequence awaited than pretend that shit was kosher.

But his misinterpretation of her meaning was quickly realized when Bulma brought her hand to the top of his swim trunks and yanked the waistband, nearly tearing them over his dick. What the fuck? Vegeta leapt from the couch in a red hot panic. All the blood that hadn't betrayed him completely still riotously leapt to pool across his face.

She was fucking laughing, and Vegeta cupped his hand over his shorts to hide his humiliation. Was she making fun of him too? Was this one of those things where a popular girl seduced the freak only to laugh the moment she'd proven she could get him aroused?

"What the fuck is wrong with you!? Why are you like this?" he shouted.

It was fucked up. He'd never asked to be here, and the fact that the entire day was spent defending himself from the psychological warfare of people who, even within the structured confines of their high school that suppressed their worst intentions were inexorably horrible, made it so much worse. Maybe they'd influenced her, but Vegeta suspected that, despite his memory and short moments where she seemed almost human, like when she'd asked about Tarble or stayed to help with the dishes, Bulma was inherently just as shitty as the rest.

"Kami, relax! I was just kidding!" Her laughter pittered out with a dull hiss, like the fire he'd smothered with a bucket of lake water; whatever fun she'd been having at his expense was over and muted to guilt. "Vegeta, come on, please don't be upset. I said I was kidding!" she pleaded at his back as he stormed off to bed.

Good, if she felt bad, he wasn't going to validate her crappy excuse for an apology. He didn't give a shit whether Bulma Briefs lived or died, much less cared to alleviate her mild sense of remorse. As much as he wanted her to stew in it, he knew she wouldn't. The moment she laid her pretty head against her silken pillows, she'd forget.

Angry as he was, he forced himself to remember that she didn't matter the way none of them mattered and was just another fleeting nuisance he was forced to endure in the moment. Less than one year stood between him and freedom. The moment he turned eighteen, he and his brother would be gone, somehow.

Falling asleep wasn't easy, not that it ever was, but especially now that it was raining, practically sideways, pelting against the windows. It fit the mood so well he wondered if he'd summoned it. Same as the rain, the bullshit from the day refused to let up the heavy beat of his pulse as it forced him, the same way his father's outbursts always forced him to realistically calculate his future.

Fucking assholes. It's not like he was trying to be strange and aloof. He just was. He couldn't identify with any of them even if he wanted to because, for him, there were far more important things to worry about than being popular. Figuring out his future was paramount to making friends, especially ones as shitty as Yamcha, Tien, Launch, and as he was beginning to suspect, Bulma too. People like that were a waste of time. Yet knowing it didn't make their insults hurt any less.

Even if those idiots barely scraped by in school, their parents were alumni at the best universities and would get them accepted to any of them. And despite that he was technically in the same position, he didn't want it, and not because getting into an Ivy League thanks to his name and father's affluence was objectively pathetic, and not even because Vegeta didn't want to owe his old man anything, not ever. He had other plans, ones that kept him awake on nights like this, plotting and worrying and hoping.

He'd graduate a year from now, a legal adult with a piece of paper that gave him some credence in the job market. Though how he'd get one, even far away from home, without his father using his extensive resources to track him and Tarble down was another weighty obstacle. A part of him couldn't see how, by playing under the radar without throwing his entire family into a nationwide scandal, he could get away with leaving unless he changed their names or moved to another country or both.

He tossed and turned, trying to push down the feelings that the stormy rain only served to amplify, when the door creaked open, spilling a thin strip of light from the hallway. For a fleeting moment, he dreaded the idea that it was Bulma come to argue, beg forgiveness, or flirt shamelessly under the guise of either. But the tiny silhouette that tiptoed across the floor to his bedside was a welcome relief.

"What's up T? Can't sleep?"

The boy shook his head and pointed toward the open bedroom door.

"Kat wet the bed," he told him.

Vegeta groaned, knowing that he'd be the one to clean the mess up in the morning.

"Come on." He sat up to help Tarble remove his soiled pajamas and change into one of Vegeta's t-shirts that looked like an oversized nightgown with the way the collar hung off his narrow shoulders and was long enough to cover his knees.

Even more so than Vegeta, Tarble was a small kid. He was born almost ten weeks prematurely in an emergency c-section when their mother came down with preeclampsia. At least that was the official story. Her tumble down the stairs induced labor far too soon, and perhaps was the initial trigger that resulted with her passing away the next morning. Tarble's life for many weeks after was touch and go, stuck in NICU in an incubator without anyone sane enough to visit.

Both Vegeta and his father were suddenly thrust into abject mourning for the woman who, they didn't realize at the time, had been their lynchpin. Their father was never an openly loving person, not like their mother was. He was a career politician who's entire identity was formed by the accolades of his power. He made an exception for her, lowered his ego in small doses through small gestures that were just enough to keep her from divorcing him, from taking Vegeta, cutting town, and causing a scandal that would irreparably damage his potential. A part of Vegeta wished she'd had the balls to do it, but the other part of him was glad she didn't because Tarble wouldn't exist otherwise. The fact that she threatened as much amplified his respect for her, now that he was attempting the same drastic feat, especially because, unlike her, he didn't even love the guy, which made the severity of her stakes all the more noteworthy.

The man was two-faced. What the electorate saw was a far different person than the one Vegeta knew behind closed doors. To most people that had the displeasure of working with him—unless they were particularly useful or he was on camera—his father was ruthless and insensate, so focused on his own power trip that he'd mow down anyone and anything in his path, even his own campaign platforms, shamelessly thwarting the people who voted for him, and most especially, his own fucking children just to gain another leg up the rung.

After their mother passed, the man became a caricature of his worst qualities. He was hopelessly depressed and took to drinking to fill the void she left behind. Vegeta suspected that he blamed the baby for her death. At first, he did too, but not to the same extent as his father who never held Tarble, not once, and even to this day, barely spoke to the boy. After their mother died, his father threw himself into campaigning for another election, which of course, without his wife's stabilizing presence had become even more crutched by seedy favors, late night indulgence and frivolous parties. What was already a problem before she'd gone, had become an uninhibited nightmare that Vegeta himself absorbed the brunt of when he'd come home drunk and likely coming down to face the unbearable responsibility of his sons.

At first, their father hired a nanny to care for them, but the nanny was lazy and neglectful, letting the baby cry through the night, leaving him hungry and soiled. Vegeta, at eleven years old, was the one who got up to change his diapers, to feed him formula at all hours of the day and night, to rock him back to sleep. Once the nanny was let go for stealing, his father never hired another one, assuming that Vegeta was capable of caring for his brother himself. He'd go to daycare when Vegeta was back in school, but the rest of it, every morning, every night, every weekend, every spring and winter break, and every summer for six years, Vegeta cared for him. While he hated being responsible for Tarble the first few years that were marked by crying and illness after illness, now, more than ever, he was glad for it. He didn't trust anyone else to the job.

The kid, despite always being so sickly and weak, never let his shortcomings affect his perpetual good mood. It was like he didn't know he was any different, that he was missing anything at all. He never knew that he had a mother once upon a time, and not once did he even ask about her. Nor did he seem to understand that their father was a heartless asshole who never gave him an ounce of love or care. The man had probably spoken less than ten words to the boy his whole six years of life, yet Tarble didn't seem to be affected by it, like that was just the way of things. He was pure and sweet, and Vegeta was determined to keep him that way, to protect him and never let anyone make him feel like he was anything less. Vegeta knew questions about their parents would be asked eventually, and he just hoped he would find the right words when that day came.

The kid climbed into bed, and Vegeta wrapped an arm around his tiny frame, listening to the steady thud of his heartbeat and the summer rain that let up just as they fell asleep.


	4. Cabin Days

**Chapter 4: Cabin Days**

The birds had been chirping since four in the morning. Vegeta never could sleep through the night and laid in the dark listening to them, his mind lazily ruminating from one preoccupying thought to the next until seven—the time he usually sloughed out of bed to fit in a jog, which was as good of cure as any to level his head before the day, bit by bit, wore him down.

Here, there was only one path to run, the Briefs' cabin being the very last property at the edge of a national forest where the hardwoods of the south met the boreals of the north. Vegeta ran up the long gravel drive and down the single, lonely road they'd driven in on. It was beautiful, premium real estate, remote as they came, with dense woods lining either side of the road so thick he couldn't see more than a few yards into them before their details all blurred together like staring too closely at a Monet.

Already, the day was hot and muggy, much worse away from the lake where there wasn't a breeze, and the rich scent of foliage hung in the air like a thick fog making it difficult to breathe. After just two miles, he was slick with sweat and turned back, which was probably for the best.

Tarble, he never worried about, and most days, he could fit in eight or so miles while the boy slowly roused himself from bed to sit cross-legged in front of the television watching nature programs on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic.

It was the idea of Kakarot waking up unsupervised that worried him, and justifiably so. When Vegeta entered the cabin, the boy was standing on the kitchen counter, leaping for a box of pancake mix on the cupboard's top shelf.

"Kakarot! You're gonna break your damn neck!" Vegeta shouted as he darted across the room to nab the kid around the waist and yanked him from the ledge.

"But I want the pancakes!" Kakarot exclaimed in a cartoonish tone of mock outrage, and hopped to hoist himself right back up the second his feet had touched the ground. For such a stout, compact little beast, he certainly was agile, as if his chubby limbs were just lean muscle hidden under puffs of air.

"Yeah, I got that," Vegeta said as he was forced to pull the boy down again. "You smell like piss, man. Both of you go clean up, and I'll make your damn food."

Kakarot whooped and charged down the hall, feet thundering chaotically beneath him. Tarble only turned to rest his chin on the back of the couch and watch Kakarot go, the droop of his eyelids suggesting he wasn't yet prepared to deal with the menace.

While the boys ate, Vegeta went to work changing Kakarot's bedsheets before he showered and hastily readied, unable to ignore his cousin's harassment from outside the bathroom door, who after inhaling a dozen flapjacks, was already bored and begging to visit his esteemed tree fort.

The hot stick in the air grew worse the higher the sun climbed, and not even the shaded density of foliage provided relief. Their shirts clung to their backs as they followed Kakarot through the wilderness, trusting that his purposeful stride was leading them in the right direction, not having a path to go on.

Aside from the unbearable heat and humidity, Vegeta couldn't help but admire the almost otherworldly beauty of the place. The trees had a mystical glow about them where thin jets of light streamed through the canopy, like spotlights at the play theater, to illuminate their subjects in bright contrast to the surrounding shadows. The mossy forest floor gave under his feet, springy in a way that was reminiscent of the boxing ring, only softer, and each of their footsteps kicked up spores that glittered when they happened to pass under a spotlight.

"Told you!" Kakarot shouted, and sprinted towards a thick Maple that was least five feet around and sixty feet tall, maybe more. It appeared as if two trees were siamese twins conjoined at the trunk, and where they split a third of the way up was perched a house, a real house, just as the boy had described without the embellishment he'd assumed the kid had lent it.

Two levels of chocolate-stained deck circled among the branches, and in the center sat a four-walled structure that looked as if it was a girl's dollhouse fantasy—its pointed frame was topped with dark, polygonal shingles which contrasted against the beveled siding that'd been painted a creamy white. The home was complete with little, projecting dormers that blinked prettily atop the grills of its cottage windows, which had been stained to match the deck.

Wooden two-by-fours were drilled into a spiral latter around the trunk, and like the decks, they were stained and glossed to a polished effect that, just as much, protected them from the elements. The boys climbed ahead of him, their feet already shuffling across the deck before Vegeta poked his head from the opening, admiring its beveled edges that were as practical as they were decorative, preventing one's skin from scratching as they emerged at the top. The sturdy railing that surrounded the deck was made of two-by-twos placed inches apart so that the kids could never fall through them. And above that first platform was another short ladder that extended to the main deck where the small shed sat. Its pointed roof reminded him of the Briefs' own cabin, but a miniature version in the sky.

"This is mine, you know," Kakarot boasted once they'd reached the upper level, flicking his hand around the inside of the sturdy structure with a kind of unaffected pride, showing it off in the same manner as the owners of all the self congratulating mansion tours Vegeta had endured as a child, toted around vast estates as his parents feigned strategic interest in the assets of their compeers. "Me and Bulma and Dr. Briefs made it last summer," he clarified.

"Bulma helped build this?" His surprise at the statement felt tainted in a way, if only because it forced him to remember what Bulma used to be like back when he'd known her, always getting her hands dirty… always fucking dirty if he was being completely accurate. She loved to concoct something out of nothing, whether it was busting apart expensive, remote-controlled collector model cars and boats to hot-rod with her own engines that they raced in her dad's hanger and the swimming pool behind it, or her goddamn homemade smoke bombs and fireworks that Vegeta learned, quickly, were best to observe from a distance.

According to Kakarot, Bulma not only helped build the house, but she designed the whole structure and even had its original, hand-drawn blueprints specially framed and gifted to him, which were now hung in his bedroom at home.

"Me and Bulma sleep up here sometimes," said Kakarot, a declaration that prompted Tarble to jump up and down, begging and pulling at Vegeta's arm to do just that tonight.

Vegeta ignored him, hoping the request would just wear off with the kid's attention span as he continued to inspect the space.

Once inside, there wasn't much to it, just a ten by ten open room, minus a cut out in one corner for the tree to continue to grow through—not that its simplicity detracted from the high quality of its craftsmanship. It was tastefully simple in a way that forced him to notice the flawless details that were there, constructed with immaculate consideration and attention. The floors were perfectly level, four inch wide glossed planks, and a white colonial baseboard circled around them to give the space a homey feel. In the picture windows, where they extended out beneath their dormers a few inches, were figurines, collector action figures that'd been placed on plastic pedestals. Kakarot ran around the room to tell a story about every damned one, mostly Marvel and DC figurines he'd somehow gathered in his short life and had a strange expert knowledge of their values, down to the damn penny.

"Geta, please!" Tarble continued to tug at his arm, whining about sleeping in the place. What if he had a nightmare or needed Vegeta and he wasn't there?

"You have a phone, duh," Kakarot stated as if his doubts were plainly visible.

"Alright, fine. If that's what you really want," Vegeta agreed, knowing that when the time came, his brother would chicken out anyway.

They trekked back to the cabin to find it in the same quiet state they'd left it, except more so when they realized that Bulma and Raditz were gone. Vegeta changed into swim trunks in the empty bedroom where Raditz had been sleeping and was mildly curious of their whereabouts, but the mystery was quickly solved when he met the boys in the yard. The jet ski lift was empty, and he was relieved to not have to deal with either of them for the time being. A normal day tested his patience, and in this weather with those two morons, he didn't stand a chance.

Escaping the nearly unbearable heat had one easy and obvious solution, and they took turns leaping off the deep end of the dock to find relief in the cool water. Unfortunately, the peace didn't last long.

Bulma and Raditz returned with the jet ski, tearing into shore at a speed that destroyed the calm, lapping waves where the young boys had been treading.

"Whoa, cool!" Tarble chirped, bobbing up with the cresting water. He swam toward the back of the watercraft where Raditz had jumped off to drag it to the edge of the dock. "Can I ride on it, please?"

"Sure kid! After your brother, though," Bulma said.

The heiress caught Vegeta's eye where he stood on the dock, smiling at him like nothing had happened last night, or maybe the whole episode, she'd more or less forgotten. Either way, he wasn't going to pay her attention and adopted a rather haughty kind of stance, crossing his arms with his chin tipped up, refusing to meet her gaze.

"Not interested."

"Oh, come on, Vegeta! This is part of the cabin experience. You have to!"

No, he didn't. And like hell would he let Tarble ride the thing with her—though now, thanks to the idiot telling him otherwise, Vegeta was going to have to play the bad guy and let him down.

A soggy life vest landed on the tops of his feet. "Don't be such a pussy, dude." Raditz teased as he hopped onto the dock to shake out his hair like a mutt.

They just couldn't resist. It seemed like belittling him was some kind of game, and they were taking bets to see who could snap him first. While he could brush off the routine mockery of his social peculiarities, or at least his cousin's to an extent, they were berating him in front of Tarble. On top of it being embarrassing, it forced him to play along, begrudgingly, if he didn't want the kid to turn out just like him, or worse, like them.

"Ugh, fine. One ride. But get them out of the water. I'd prefer they don't drown while I'm gone."

Reluctantly, Vegeta plucked the life vest from where it dripped over the wooden planks and climbed onto the back of the jet ski to sit behind the girl putting as much space between them as the short bench would allow. The engine rumbled to life and vibrated the hull between his legs, and as Bulma spun it to face the open water, she turned towards him over her shoulder with a sly grin. "Hold on tight."

He hadn't yet buckled the last strap of his vest when she blasted off like the flag had dropped in some goddamn Formula One race, and he was nearly launched off the back, forced to quickly close the gap between them as he threw his arms around her.

"You could have warned me!" he scolded.

"I did warn you!"

After a few minutes without her talking, just driving, the wind whipping their faces as they tore across the lake at fifty miles per hour, Vegeta tried his best to relax and enjoy the ride. The wind felt good on a day like this, but being forced to straddle her, have her backside pressed up against him with their thighs brushing together, her damp hair blowing in his face, and his nose so close to her neck that he could smell the coconut sunscreen, enjoyment was becoming mission impossible, and he prayed that the trip would be a quick one.

He didn't know how she did it—how every conscious neuron in his head could loathe her, yet every time she touched him, his body would rebel against his better judgment. She was a goddamn siren, and the longer he was forced to remain in her presence, the dumber he became as if lulled into some strange hypnosis. Twice he jerked his head up from where he felt his chin dropping against her shoulder.

The ride was smooth, and the water glistened off the sunlight as they carved across its surface disrupted only by the occasional waves churned up by passing boats. Bulma cut way too close to a group of fishermen trolling off the coast of an island, prompting the old men to curse at her as they teetered on unsteady legs and grabbed the hulls of their dinghies that rocked in their wake; though Bulma didn't seem to notice.

She drove straight, for the most part, parallel to the shore until they'd passed the islands; then she veered toward the open water. Vegeta wondered what her path was, at first assuming she'd ride the circumference of the entire lake, which even at max speed, would take an eternity. The lake was six times as long as it was wide at its center. From its aerial portrait in the Briefs' living room, it resembled the thin pupil of a cat squinting up at the sun. Their cabin was on the northernmost edge where it narrowed, and he was relieved as she left the coast to cut their trip in half.

When they reached the lake's wide middle, Bulma suddenly released her tight hold on the throttle, pitching him forward, flush against her back as their momentum dramatically slowed. But before he could ponder her motive, his stomach violently lurched, left behind as they were both catapulted into the air, as if the hand of God had come down from the sky to yank them off the watercraft and chuck them in the opposite direction from which the thing had violently turned. They skipped across the surface like rocks, but less elegantly with the way their limbs detangled as they each instinctively tried to brace their own fall and soften the blow as they hit the hard water. Bulma had nailed his jaw with her elbow at some point in their tumble, and the irony taste of blood filled his mouth from a badly busted lip. She'd whacked him so hard that his teeth ached worse than when he'd been jabbed in the mouth by some fat catchweight in the ring playing down his weight class.

"What the fuck was that?" he shouted once he'd coughed the lake water from his lungs and regained his bearings enough to see the girl swimming toward him.

"A donut," she laughed like it was the funnest thing in the world and continued to do so even as she observed him spitting blood from between his teeth. "Might have been going too fast though. Only you were supposed to fall."

"That's fucking hilarious. Thanks."

He didn't know why he was so angry when he'd expected something to go awry on this little adventure from the moment she demanded he come along; though being thrown from a jet ski at thirty miles per hour wasn't exactly what he'd imagined. Bulma Briefs was a goddamn wild card, more so now than ever before. When she slowed the thing, a spark zipped through his head that wondered if she wasn't going to cut the engine in the middle of the open water, hold him hostage under the unbreathable heat of a high noon sun to torture out his feelings. In a way, he was glad this train of thought hadn't proven fortuitous, because he'd rather suffer a busted lip than her terrorizing mouth.

The jet ski was capsized and floating away from them. Vegeta reached it before she did and quickly tipped it back upright, all the while, tuning out her shrill voice as she screeched at him to wait, as if she thought he'd leave her.

"That was the wrong way! You probably flooded the engine!" she griped. All her earlier laughter inverted as she pointed to a sticker on the back with an arrow that he didn't notice before. Indeed, he'd flipped it the wrong direction.

Bulma hoisted herself back onto the jet ski and tried to start the engine, but it wouldn't turn over and only coughed and sputtered the waterlogged contents of its mechanical lungs.

"Nice work, Vegeta! Gonna have to swim it back!"

The way she sat on the thing, arms crossed and a pout on her lips, implied that she thought _he_ would push it back while she posed atop it like a princess. Fat fucking chance. This wasn't his fault; it was hers and her childish obsession with practical jokes.

"Screw you. I didn't even want to come in the first place." With that he did find the resolve to leave her and began to swim back to the nearest shore, abandoning the heiress to her throne in the middle of the lake.

"Wait! Where are you going? Vegeta, you can't leave me out here! Come back!"

A splash sounded over his shoulder, and Vegeta didn't have to look back to know she was swimming to catch him. The idea of her dog paddling frantically, leaving her jet ski behind to float in the tide touched a nerve of guilt, and he found himself turning around.

"You're an idiot."

She huffed and ignored him in the childishly stubborn way of a person who knew full well that she was wrong but couldn't bring herself to admit it, and instead, opted for silence as they began the long journey back to the cabin, pushing the jet ski ahead of them. But with Bulma, of course, the silence could only last so long.

"What do you mean you didn't want to come? Did you mean to the cabin or just the jet ski ride?"

"Both," he answered honestly.

"Come on, Vegeta. What the hell is your problem? Do you have to be so stuck up and insufferable all the time? Isn't it exhausting? Don't you get sick of fighting everybody? Can't you just relax and have fun every once in a while? You don't need to be so perfect and serious and..." She made sure to lay him out flat, to list off every kami-damned fault before she tacked on the million dollar question with some hesitancy. "Vegeta, why don't you have any friends?"

It was the question everyone wondered, as if by law, the son of a powerful, popular and attractive senator who was esteemed for better or worse by everyone in the state, should have grown to wear the same shoes and walk on water like a demigod. But they didn't understand the lengths his father went to become that way. And it wasn't like the man had any friends either, not real ones like she thought. Friends was a dirty word in Vegeta's purview. Friends were just clever jargon for useful assets, things rather than people, whose sole purpose was a mutual trade of favors that could advance a mutual goal—the unending, unsatiating quest for power.

His father was so far gone that he'd go to criminal lengths to further his position, to level-up another rung in the shitty latter of politics, a real-world popularity contest that people used as a yardstick for their own self worth. His quest was an addiction at its core; attaining the next position never made his father happy but only made him plot and fiend for a better one. He always wanted more. It was a sickness, and worse was that he used their family as justification, claiming that he was doing it all for them, and if not them, then the voters and their needs. Perhaps, he was so delusional that he really believed the garbage he publicly promised, even as he sold-out his constituents behind closed doors, and even, maybe, when he came home to his so-called beloved family every few weeks to tear their peace apart.

The people Bulma wanted so desperately to impress were just like him. It didn't take a genius to understand that she was different now not because five years had passed, but because she was acting out of some belief that she needed their approval. For some reason she was playing a chameleon, morphing herself into a person she thought they'd like because she was desperate for their so-called friendship. Why she was, he didn't know. What was certain was that Bulma would eventually forget that she was ever the strange, dirty tomboy who liked to break things, rebuild them into her own or blow them up—a girl who was so confident, she didn't care what anyone thought as she trudged through fancy parties smelling of gasoline. Back then, she tried to impress him not because she wanted his approval, but because she was proud of her work, and he was the only one, in an estate that was always buzzing about with people, that would pay her projects the attention they deserved. But now, she didn't deserve any of it. She offered nothing but a pretty face the way she carried on.

"Friends?" he spat. "You think those assholes are your friends? They're not!"

"Ugh, you don't know them. Maybe this is all a misunderstanding. You know you're kind of an asshole too, right? You don't make it easy for people to like you."

"But that's the thing, Bulma. I don't give a shit if anyone likes me."

True as it was, she only scoffed in frustration because she didn't understand. Her life was one of leisures, with every pampered whim instantly fulfilled by a horde of tutors, housekeepers, chefs, nannies, drivers, gardeners, pool boys, all of it—where his house was in a state of consistent decay. Sure, his father kept the groundskeepers to maintain outward appearances, but inside, their home was falling apart in more ways than one.

"This isn't just about me," Vegeta went on. "I don't have the luxury of fucking off all day with some dipshits and pretend that they're my friends. I have Tarble to think about." Somehow he felt the urge to enlighten the heiress, if even just a little, to help her understand that he wasn't being an insolent jackass for the fun of it. He was prioritizing his time and energy into the one thing that truly mattered. But even that, she was unwilling to validate.

"Is that what this is about? Your brother? Why doesn't your dad just hire a nanny? This shouldn't be all on you, ya know."

If she was trying to test his patience, she was succeeding spectacularly. The mere mention of sloughing off Tarble to some nanny, if she were anyone else, would have triggered him to rage, but somehow, ironically, he was still dumbly attached to the thought of her as an ally, in its basest of forms.

"Are you fucking kidding me? I'm not gonna let my brother be raised by some stranger that's getting paid to take care of him. You all can call me fucking crazy, go ahead. But I _want_ to do it."

"But what about when you go to uni? You're gonna have to get one eventually, so why not start looking and-"

"I'm not going."

"What!?" She snapped her head to look at him as she swam, causing his ears to burn under the scrutiny. "But you're the valedictorian! You're the senator's son! That doesn't make any sense. You can't skip college just to babysit until… When? How old is he?"

"Six next week."

"Kami, Vegeta! What does your dad say? Somehow I don't see him approving of his eldest son, and his namesake, skipping uni for this."

"He's not a this, he's a person. And I'll be eighteen. I won't need my father's approval or his money. I'll get a job. Work when Tarble's in school."

At that, the heiress stopped swimming completely. She'd traded her ignorant reproof of his social abstinence and was looking at him deeply with her brows turned together like he was some kind of human enigma. Academically the girl was a damn genius, and socially she was confused, but personally, he sensed he'd said too much because the puzzled, cross expression with which she examined him felt a bit prophetic.

"Is there something going on at home that you're not telling me?"

"No, of course not. I just… I care about him is all."

"But that doesn't explain-"

He spun to face her, internally pleading yet attempting to slough her off the topic by adopting a casual tone, relaxed in the extreme. "There's nothing to it, Bulma. I like the kid. Is that not good enough for you?"

She nodded once, but her overscrupulous gaze wouldn't let up as she tilted her head like an inquisitive puppy and continued to stare at him; when suddenly, before he had time to react, she'd grabbed him by his hair, pulled his face into hers and pressed their lips together, kissing him clumsily with their noses bumped together.

Vegeta was stunned for a moment as he felt the wet pressure of her lips smash firmly against his, so quick and unexpected, he didn't have the time to digest the act before it was suddenly over. She'd already pulled away, her expressionless stare either testing his reaction or, perhaps, hinting a bafflement of her own motive.

The feelings that finally rushed back to him were piqued and panicked by the awkward, boyish way his voice inflected when he unconsciously spat, "What the hell was _that_?" It pitched so high, it sounded as if someone else had asked the question.

"I dunno! Nothing!" she snapped. Her face had gone redder than his felt, stiff with genuine embarrassment, a look so curiously foreign on her that Vegeta forgot his own nervous insecurity, and was instead forced to bite his busted lip between his teeth to stifle a self-vindicating smirk at the off-chance she'd mistake it for something more. For once he'd gotten under _her_ skin, and even if it was unintentional, he reveled in watching her suffer the discomfort.

She tore her gaze away to stare past him at a fishing boat that was trolling towards them, as if relieved by the distraction. But at the same time, she was woefully unfulfilled by her own deferment, never being the type to brush a feeling under the rug, and found the humility to mutter, "I didn't mean to… I just think you're a really good person, Vegeta. Your brother is lucky."

"Hey lovebirds!" the fishermen shouted, the very same they'd rocked back at the islands. "Looks like you could use a tow!"


	5. Street Fair

**Chapter 5: Street Fair**

The lift motor whirred as Bulma raised her prided hunk of fiberglass from the water. She'd spend all afternoon fixing it, she assured him, with a hint of contempt in her voice as if he ought to feel sorry, but regret certainly wasn't floating among Vegeta's odd mix of emotions. As he crossed the lawn toward where Raditz and the boys were circled around an Oak tree, his fingers brushed over his swollen bottom lip ruminating on its tingling numbness, for which he was certain, and surprised he wasn't repulsed to admit, had nothing to do with the heiress's elbow.

Everything about her was irritatingly prurient, yet when she kissed him, she seemed wholly herself, a momentary lapse in her careful roleplay that even if the outcome was the same misguided vulgarity, in that instance, he found it somewhat amusing. But more than that, he couldn't unknot the vulnerable rush of anxiety from the strange thrill, and he looked back for a moment to watch her unlatch the jet ski's hood and bend over the engine. She was a kami-damned sorcerous, and he knew that, especially now, if he wasn't careful, he'd be hopelessly spellbound to a complicated distraction he lacked the time, energy, and quite frankly, the reputation to afford.

Vegeta met Tarble at the foot of the tree. His brother's hip was cocked against a bright orange Wiffle bat staring up to where Kakarot dangled from a branch ten feet off the ground. Their cousin was red-faced and straining with heavy grunts as his thick arms flexed in an attempt to pull himself up. He must have been at it for a while, because his arms slacked straight for a moment to hang and catch a breath before he frowned back up at the branch above him, and with a second wind of determination, swung his lower half up to wrap his legs around the limb for leverage, spooning his body around the thick branch like a baby sloth.

"Come 'on Kat! That's cheating!" Raditz scolded from below, folding his arms against his chest as if he were some disgruntled referee itching to blow the whistle on foul play.

"Is not!" Kakarot scoffed. He flipped himself up to straddle the branch and stood, bracing himself against the tree trunk as he stretched his chubby arm above his head to swat the Wiffle ball off the twigs, a little monkey gunning for fruit. He knocked it back to the ground, and Tarble whooped and chased the ball down the lawn before it could roll into the lake.

"Okay Rad, comin' down!" Kakarot signaled his brother from ten feet above. Vegeta felt his heart jump up his throat, his well-honed parental instincts thrown into sudden panic as Kakarot leapt from the tree with his limbs splayed out like a flying squirrel toward his brother, who had barely uncrossed his arms in time to catch him.

"Oh fuck!" Vegeta doubled over, trying to cleanse his mind of the thought of Kakarot belly-flopping the lawn, much less the lip he'd hear from his aunt, who would undoubtedly hold him personally responsible for the actions of her idiotic sons should they injure themselves under his watch. "You sure you moron's weren't adopted?"

Honestly, besides the fact they looked like their father, Kakarot specifically, there was no familial resemblance beyond that, especially not on Aunt Gine's side. His cousins were careless, monkey-brained dolts, the opposite of both of their parents. Aunt Gine was cunning and conniving, as much as her older brother, Vegeta's father, and she was just as cutthroat when it came to advancing their family's position—the reason she pushed her husband into the role of his chief of staff, or campaign manager when elections were in season. If she wasn't willing to work for her brother outright, she was going to ensure that her husband held a position of power in his political matrix.

Uncle Bardock was smart too and entirely qualified for the jobs with which he'd been tasked, but compared to Gine and his father, Bardock was a beta in a pack of vicious wolves. He seemed like a caricature of a mob boss's consigliere, the one with less balls and a hint of conscience who still did the dirty work when necessary and could manipulate and threaten with the best of them, but always seemed a bit nervously haunted, like he was being chased by a virtuous ghost. And maybe he was. Vegeta's own mother had been close to Bardock, and despite his faults, Vegeta quite liked him too, still to this day. Of all the adults in his radius, Uncle Bardock always seemed the most human. Maybe his mother's spirit was the one that sweated him because he was proportionally the weakest link with the most power, the only adult that could, and if pushed far enough, perhaps would make a bit of difference in her sons' lives. But that bet was based on Bardock having the spine to be virtuous, to balk his wife and brother-in-law and take a stand. Unfortunately, as far as Vegeta could surmise, both his aunt and uncle were clueless of the monster they enabled and truly believed the official story of his mother's death. They never hinted that they knew, or even suspected, what his father had done or what he was doing to them still.

"Hey, Geta," Tarble was at his side tugging on his hand. "I'm hungry, but um, after lunch can we go to the fort to bring the stuff? Remember, like you promised?"

Tarble never could let a viable promise go to waste; the kid was thrifty, which is why Vegeta was careful to dole them out. More than not wanting to appear a liar, he preferred to avoid at all costs the pathetic, puppy-dog pout his brother had perfected from the moment he could recognize the effect of his own expressions on the people around him. His brows pinned upward at the middle over his wide, chocolate eyes and puffy bottom lip. Even if the only person he wasn't fooling was Vegeta, it didn't lessen the boy's power, as if the whole world owed Tarble a debt that Vegeta would carry out personally. In a way it did, and his brother never asked for much that was beyond reason. Unlike himself, Tarble didn't inherit their father's short fuse, and Vegeta could count on one hand the amount of times he'd thrown an irreconcilable tantrum.

Yet when he agreed to let them sleep in the fort, he hadn't realized it would be a hot afternoon's endeavor spent, begrudgingly, pack-muling sleeping bags, and games, and snacks, and anything else the two could think of as unquestionably necessary to have on hand. It took two pointless trips back and forth through the woods considering the odds of them actually braving the night there were slim to none. If Raditz had helped they could have managed in one, but instead, he chose to sit on the edge of the dock to admire the heiress's backside and hand her tools like some love-drunk assistant.

The sound of the jet ski rumbling back to life could be heard through the trees as they made their second trip back, and above it, Bulma's self-congratulatory squeals, gleeful as Dr. Frankenstein animating a monster. The bikini-clad heiress skipped up the lawn toward him grinning in the bubbly, illustrious way she had when they were kids with her hair tangled into dreadlocks and grease streaked across her forehead, chin and chest where she'd carelessly wiped at her sweat. Vegeta tried to ignore his body's anxious riot—a visceral kick of his heart, as if it'd been launched into his mouth, and if he weren't already flushed from hiking in this heat, he'd be classically gunning to get away and hide his face. But for once, he didn't want to brush her off when she'd hooked an arm with his to extol her own success, chatting rapidly about spark plugs and engine cylinders and oil changes without bothering to translate, as if he too were a mechanic capable of grasping her babble. It floated over his head, but not just for lack of understanding; had he really been trying to follow, he could have caught the gist. It was the hypnotizing speed and ease with which she spoke that turned his brain to goo, and he was unable to focus on anything but the brilliant energy in her smile, radiating and unnaturally white below the apples of her dirty cheeks and her blue eyes that were popped wide with cheerful revelry—a far departure from the earlier way they'd been pinned by her sociopathic schemes and calculations.

Maybe she really was Dr. Frankenstein and _he_ was her monster, because it felt as if she was reviving some lost part of him: the free-willed, irresponsible teen he'd smothered long before he'd ever had the chance to awaken. And now he found himself to be the one calculating ploys as he wondered how and under what conditions he could compel her to kiss him again on her own accord while he disguised it's what he really wanted.

But as they stepped into the house, all of his unusual fantasies that fanned a precarious delight were evaporated in a puff of smoke when she said, "Yamcha wants us to meet them in town. There's a street fair on Main."

_Us_ was quite the overstatement. Yamcha didn't want to see anyone but her, and she wasn't stupid enough to not understand that, which meant maybe she _wanted_ Vegeta to come, or maybe she just wanted to include them all like some team-spirited cheerleader. Regardless, as annoyed as he'd be with her bounding off to meet that intellect-throttling, drawal of a douchebag and his moronic friends, Vegeta wasn't about to suffer in their presence. Hell, he'd be happy, anxious and annoyed at first, but happy to spend the night alone. He'd drop the kids in the tree fort, and who gave a shit what Raditz did, to an extent—a curfew, if the jackass wanted to putz around at a street fair with the douche-troupe. And if Raditz wouldn't abide, they still had the morning to buffer any problems. Vegeta didn't give a shit what his cousin did, as long as the ingrate didn't puke in his car on the drive home or somehow tip-off his parents.

He was about to bid good riddance to the lech, but she was back to her manipulative ways as she made sure to force his hand, turning to Tarble who dawdled behind them asking, "Doesn't a street fair sound like fun?"

"What's a street fair?"

"Seriously? Kami, Vegeta! Don't you let him do anything fun?" She scolded. "Well kid, you see, it's like a theme park, but just smaller."

When Tarble's eyebrows furrowed further, Bulma tore her arm from Vegeta's and used it to shove him. "Oh my god! Vegeta, you've never taken him to a theme park?"

"He's barely six. It's not like he can go on any rides," he muttered with more shame in his tone than defense. He knew he should've been introducing the kid to more worthwhile experiences, but he only started driving last year, and with their schedules, at least during the school year, and the stress of those types of places anyway…

"Kid, you're brother is a stick in the mud, and you're gonna have fun today with or without him. We're going, and we're gonna eat _shit_ tons of—err, I mean—tons of candy and play tons of games, and there's probably live music. Do you know how to dance?"

Tarble scrunched his nose before he cocked a hip and crossed his arms like a diva. "I don't wanna dance! Can't we just play the games?"

"Nope. You have to dance with me once." Bulma mirrored his posture, which, unable to grasp the heiress's breed of sarcasm, just flustered the poor kid. He turned to Vegeta with an indignant huff that failed to hide his distress, desperate for his brother to resolve the situation and quickly.

"She's just kidding, T. Come on, let's go change." He waved a palm at the boy, who gave Bulma a wide berth and a suspicious eye as he passed her.

The four cousins had been dressed and waiting in the living room, with three-quarters of them itching to go by the time Bulma waltzed down the staircase in a mini jean skirt and a crop-top tank that somehow drew attention to the gemstones of her pierced navel more than her previous bikinis. Maybe because her tank top actually covered her boobs, his eyes were left to wander over her midriff. He felt like a dog, slack-jawed and drooling over some tramp, and the dirtiness that accompanied the feeling made him the first to charge outside toward the car.

"Shotgun!" Bulma shouted.

"Ugh, bullshit! That's so fucking bull! You're short!" Raditz whined, realizing he was about to be stuffed into the backseat of Vegeta's coupe with the kids.

"I called it, so you're ridin' bitch, bitch!".

It was amusing to see Raditz fold himself into the back of a BMW between two half pints who were excitedly screaming and batting each other across his lap that was already nearly stuffed into his chin.

"Hot ride, Vegeta. When'd you get it?" asked Bulma.

"I dunno, a year ago or something."

He knew the exact timeframe—early January more than a year ago—because the car was another so-called gift, a birthday present, technically, two months too late after his father forgot his sixteenth. The manner in which his old man tried to celebrate, once he finally recalled the event, was to summon him into the kitchen and pour him a glass of scotch in a crystal tumbler. It was a school night, and it was the only time Vegeta had ever drank the vile petrol at his father's asinine insistence, as if trying to bro-down with his underage son when he was already, not just wasted but clearly high, running his mouth about their family legacy and Vegeta becoming a man. In reality, the car was a bribe for his silence over another concussion that resulted from that evening. And the worst part was that Vegeta couldn't even remember what infraction triggered it; he only remembered in fragments the way his father fisted the hair at his nape and smashed his forehead against the marble counter.

"I don't have my license yet. Just a permit." the heiress went on. Her face brightened as an idea lit into her head, and she turned to Vegeta with an excitable tenor. "Hey, _you_ can teach me!"

"I'd have to be eighteen to let you drive, and not in my car." Kami he'd suffer far more than a concussion if he let the heiress scratch his precious Beamer.

"Okay so, when's your birthday?"

"November 9th," Tarble piped from the backseat when Vegeta didn't immediately answer, eavesdropping on his brother's every interaction with a girl because they were so rare; he seemed to find them fascinating.

"Perfect! It's a date!"

It wasn't. Driving lessons aside, by the time November rolled around, she'd be plenty indoctrinated into the Shenron Academy shitshow to know that Vegeta was not a person she would want to associate with if she cared at all about her reputation. There was no being friends with Bulma Briefs, not even on a cursory level. His reputational plague was the academy's version of a Black Death. They all hated him because he was dark and sullen and pretentious, and his only redeeming quality besides his GPA was his father's clout. As giddy as she seemed about the prospect of the two of them cutting down the West Coast Highway in his Beamer, she'd forget long before his birthday came around that it was something she'd even requested.

Parking was difficult with the way the small town bloated with summer tourists, and all of them had convened at its center for the festival which stretched down the eight or so blocks of its main avenue—brightly lit with carnival rides and booths of game vendors, food trucks, and the sounds of a country band that were muffled over the din of the crowd.

Once they'd found a spot, Vegeta sensed it would be difficult to reign-in the boys as they clamored over Raditz's lap and each other in a race to exit the car. Kakarot lunged to cross the street, but Vegeta caught his wrist in a flash, pulling him back to the curb. It seemed Raditz had other plans than to help with the kids, as his head darted around the congested street in search of their classmates, but Vegeta wasn't about to be left to supervise both boys alone, suspecting that Bulma would ditch them the moment she spotted the dumbasses.

"Raditz! He's _your_ brother. Take him!"

The dunce whipped around to scoff at the idea of sticking around to babysit his brother, but he managed to lower himself to the task and took Kakarot's hand. It was hard to tell if it was out of fear that Vegeta would rat on him for his behavior thus far, or maybe he was capable of discerning the appropriate time and place to be responsible. Despite all of Raditz's faults, Vegeta had to credit him because he'd always been a decent sibling, at least Kakarot thought so. As much as the asshat would rather spend the night sucking up to Yamcha, every once in a while, Raditz could surprise him.

Bulma, however, was predictably texting the others and lifted her head from her phone to squint down the street and take in the throng of people and activity swarming around her. There was something regretful beneath her casual tone when she turned back to them and said, "I'll meet up with you in a bit if you guys want to go ahead. I just want to say hi real quick."

Yeah right, quick. Vegeta wasn't sure what other course he'd expected the heiress to take—actually hanging out with him and the kids, feeding his brother enough candy to rot his teeth and playing games to rot his brain? Even if Tarble probably preferred Bulma wasn't around to demand a dance off him, it was the principle of the fact that the only reason they were at this stupid street fair at all was because _she_ insisted. That stoked Vegeta's frustration more than anything else, knowing that it was just another ploy to sucker them into bringing her to the destination where she truly wanted to be. So quick was Bulma to renege her promises, and worse, manipulate them all into tagging along on trips she disguised as being for the kids' benefits when they were really just meant for her to parade herself before his classmates. She was no different from his father in that way, scheming to get what she wanted by lying through her pretty white teeth.

Vegeta shrugged, feigning indifference over the anger he'd internalized, buried away in the pit of his stomach like a lost relic, which he knew would resurface, one way or another, when he least expected.

He and Raditz left her to weave through the crowd with their brothers in tow toward the game booths, all of which were the bullshit carnie variety that were rigged to take their money, but it didn't matter. It was their parents' cash, and it was worth the entertainment value witnessing the wild gestures and boisterous shouts from Tarble and Kakarot as they tried their damnedest to win a prize, claiming with comradely cheer at every failed toss of a ring or shot of a water gun that the other was so close and maybe next time. The organic way they lent one another encouragement was so oddly foreign in Vegeta's world that it was mesmerizing, like observing an alien species interact in simulated habitat while their overlords watched from above their little globe and wondered how the hell they were so happy.

In between each game, the kids stuffed their maws with shitty carnival fare that Raditz too seemed to enjoy, and was licking his fingers free of powdered sugar from a funnel cake when Kakarot pointed at a punching machine to exclaim, "Raddy, look!"

"Oh hell yeah! I'll take you on, cus!"

The greasy carnie running the booth perked up and put on his best sales pitch to beg them over. "Come on! You look like you could bust apart this machine with a finger tap!" he said to Raditz, who smirked back at Vegeta with a smug, rapturous air.

"I want the big monkey!" Kakarot cried, pointing a cotton candy coated finger at the giant, red-eyed stuffed gorilla that was the ultimate prize for breaking 900.

"I'll get your damned monkey. Easy!" Raditz professed, cracking his knuckles. "But only if Vegeta plays too."

"Tch, pass. These stupid machines aren't accurate. Besides, your height gives you an unfair advantage."

"Bullshit! You're just scared I'll win."

Vegeta smiled humorlessly, perhaps spitefully, at his cousin as he realized that once again, Raditz had successfully goaded him into competition by poking at his prideful, often irascible, nature. "Not a chance."

Raditz paid the slimy carnie and stepped up to the bag. His stance was all wrong, his feet set too wide apart and his elbow too high, poking out to the side. Vegeta wasn't about to correct the linebacker, yet despite his piss-poor posture, leaning into the jab that he threw from his shoulder instead of using his core, he still managed a score of 680, the highest won that day. Raditz spun back to the three to gloat, all pumped up on his own ego and the carnie's vapid, gimmicky praise.

Vegeta let go of Tarble's sticky fingers and waited for the carnie to reset the bag. After that amateur display, he was confident that he could easily best him, if the machine wasn't rigged of course.

"Let's see if the small fry has what it takes to toss the reigning victor from the throne!" the carnie cried, trying to incite an air of rivalry by throwing fuel at the one characteristic Vegeta had, after his entire life spent being ridiculed, more or less gotten over thanks to taking up this very sport.

Save for his opponents, nobody called him small anymore, at least not to his face unless they were masochists or dim-witted football players with something to prove, or—and it wasn't as uncommon as he once believed—just an over pressure-cooked asshat desperate to postpone an exam. What better excuse to escape a test than to have your lights punched out by instigating a fight with the school's resident psychopath? It was moronically clever of them and the only time he felt a bit bad, not for hitting his classmates, of course, because they deserved what they had coming for the shit they said. The hint of empathy he felt was for the drastic lengths some kids went to attempt to cover their failings, opting to face his fist over their parents' abject scorn. It was a bit poetic considering Vegeta could ace the same tests without needing to study and would undoubtedly face his father's fists for hitting them in the first place.

He stepped up to the machine and took a professional stance with a kind of outward lazy grace; though inwardly, he found himself unseemingly nervous, glancing at Tarble from the corner of his eye as he stood at Raditz's side intently watching with that faraway look he donned whenever he was overthinking.

The kid knew he boxed, but it was a facet of his life he preferred not to advertise. There was enough violence in their lives that Vegeta was uncomfortable with his brother witnessing more than necessary, even under the guise of controlled sportsmanship. It would only beg questions that Vegeta knew Tarble wasn't developed enough to understand their answers.

What those questions would be, if they happened to surface, Vegeta assumed would be the same ones that he asked himself with nauseating repetivity. Like why did he choose, out of the fifty fucking sports the school offered, this one? And why, after obsessing over it for three years, didn't he use it to defend himself, because Vegeta never did defend himself against their father with anything beyond his improved reflexes to duck or block a swing. By now, he could probably bring the man to his knees with a few well-timed hits, but instead, he cowered, tried to cut and run every fucking time. For as many knockouts as his legendary reputation boasted, and there were more outside the ring than in it, Vegeta still never gained what he'd wanted from the sport—defense of course, confidence, technique, an outlet, spiritually seeking a way to control the parts of him he knew had to be tamed.

Tarble was far too insightful and mature for his age not to draw the comparison.

"Today would be nice dude," chided Raditz from his periphery.

Vegeta scoffed and, just to spite him, made a fast right hook at the bag without any fanfare, one and done. He didn't even glance back at the machine to see the result, knowing a hook was faster than whatever the hell Raditz's had tried to throw, and acceleration more than power was all these dumb carnie machines were capable of sensing anyway.

"It's over 900!" the carnie cried with the same overzealous tone used by match announcers to entice the cheers of an annoyed crowd of parents that weren't interested in applauding their own sons' losses to the five and a half foot son of a famous senator.

He wasn't used to the sound of applause, and the celebratory claps and hollers from the two small kids that broke the air felt far more stifling and displaced than they should have. He much preferred to enjoy the gaping bafflement expressed across Raditz's slackened face. At least that look he was used to.

"Just give me the damn gorilla," Vegeta said and immediately handed the overstuffed ape to his little cousin's outstretched arms, ignoring the jealousy that hung from Tarble's open mouth.

"It's dumb, Kat! It's not even a gorilla. They don't have tails you know!" he heard Tarble spat at his cousin as they shuffled along behind him and Raditz.

"Hey, T! Don't be like that," he warned over his shoulder. Tarble was clearly overtired and overstretched in his capacity to socialize, and it was easy to tell that Kakarot's inexhaustible stamina was now testing his nerves. He'd done a one-eighty in the last hour, and instead of the cheery support he'd lent his cousin before, he was being jealous and petty over a cheap stuffed monkey that he'd never expressed a desire to own in the first place. On top of being tired, Vegeta knew that Tarble wasn't used to sharing his brother's attention, and the moment he gave Kakarot his winnings, the brotherly love between Tarble and his cousin had been compromised. Envy was an odd look on his little brother, and one Vegeta wanted to nip in the bud. Yet as much as Vegeta knew socializing by force was good for him, because that's all life really was, at the same time, he understood Tarble's frustration. Vegeta himself had been keen to disengage before they even fucking got here.

"Tilt A' Whirl?" Raditz asked, spinning around with the question. "You tall enough, T?"

Monkey forgotten, Tarble's gaze followed Raditz's finger toward the contraption that was spinning like an off-kilter merry-go-round at their local park, except for the tin dwellings that sat atop it that were thrust in their own random circles. Tarble turned to Vegeta, eyes pleading with the hope that he was qualified to ride it, as if he was an authority on the matter.

"You guys can go if you want. I can't stomach that shit."

"Guess titanium nerves come from our side of the family." Raditz wagged his eyebrows and gestured for the boys to follow to take their place in line. "Kat, come on! Vegeta'll hold your stuff."

Kakarot glanced between the ride, the monkey he'd dragged under one arm, and the cotton candy cone he held in the other, debating whether it was worth giving everything up for a minute on a carnival ride. His little debate pittered out when Tarble ran to meet Raditz in line, and he turned to hand Vegeta the monkey. But before he gave up the sugary treat, he stated with a severe look that was all his mother's, "You can't eat it though! It's mine, and I'll be back for it."

"We'll see about that, Kakarot." Vegeta goaded the little turd who was already committed to the ride as he watched Tarble and Raditz inch closer to the front and could only pout over his shoulder as he ran sideways to meet them. Vegeta was half inclined to toss the sticky shit into the nearest dumpster. Why anyone wanted to invent, much less ingest, some synthetic garbage that tasted like fruit but wasn't and held zero nutritional value, he was one-hundred percent certain was proof of the doom of the human race. Fucking morons.

Tarble barely measured up to the peppermint yard sick the ride operator held out to measure him, and the rapturous grin he tossed back through the crowd at Vegeta to signal that he'd passed the bar nearly ruptured his heart, squeezed and twisted it at opposite ends with joy and regret. Maybe Bulma was right and he was in over his head, because never once did he consider bringing Tarble to a place like this, and he wondered what other staples of a healthy childhood he'd inadvertently deprived his brother of by virtue of his own inexperience to these kinds of things, or his aversion to people if he was being honest. It was hard to watch him, listen to him scream with jubilance as the ride spun and jerked them round-and-round. Just witnessing it was making him nauseous.

He meant to look away, but before the thought was moved to action, his attention was wrenched from the ride for another reason entirely when he heard her familiar laughter. Vegeta spun to see Bulma and the others in the crowd standing not even thirty feet away. Yamcha pulled a flask from his pocket to, not so indiscreetly, dump booze into their cups. The arm he slung over her shoulders was so maddeningly casual, so prevailing in his claim that Vegeta inched away to disappear himself behind a throng of people, as if cowering in defeat, hoping desperately that his classmates wouldn't spot him.

He hadn't realized the ride was over, zoned-out and staring absently and defocused through the happy chaos of strangers around him. He only heard Tarble shout "That was awesome!" and felt Kakarot pull at the hem of his shirt to retrieve the ape and cotton candy. Vegeta came back to himself, blinking, and handed his cousin his contraband while he listened to Raditz and Tarble's shrieking exultations over the thrill of the ride.

"What's next?" Raditz asked him.

"I dunno, but my feet hurt."

"Come on, T, you don't need your feet to go on rides!" Raditz exclaimed.

Vegeta glanced down at the oddly missing voice in their rapture to see Kakarot holding his cotton candy before half-masted eyelids, puffed out cheeks, and pouty lips.

"You okay, Kakarot?"

The boy gave a slow shake of his head in reply before his eyes suddenly widened, popped open in a split second as his feet pivoted in a wobbly step toward his brother, and he vomited a bright, bubblegum pink spray of bile across Raditz's shoes.

"Ugh! Kakarot! The fuck!"

"Okay, it's time to go," Vegeta stated, unwilling to rub in Raditz's failed theory on one-sided familial ties to motion sickness because he didn't want Kakarot to worry that he'd done anything wrong. But for the record, he was keen to file the incident away for a later, more timely moment to prove that Raditz was an idiot.

"Just take them back to the car, will you? I'm gonna go find Bulma."

Raditz nodded without a fuss, looking pretty green himself now that he was covered up to his shins in his brother's puke.

Without knowing what he was going to say to her, Vegeta still felt a kind of annoyed obligation to the heiress to save her from Yamcha's boozy come-ons. That's what he told himself was his rationale as he waded through the mob in the direction he'd last seen them; though if he'd been faced with the same predicament before she'd kissed him, he surely would have left her to fend for herself. Now he wasn't certain how much of his obstinate need to recover her was couched in blatant jealousy, unwilling to accept the idea of leaving Bulma here to cuddle up to the asshole more and more as the night dragged on and her inhibitions took a dive into the bottom of a red plastic cup.

That kiss was real. It was the only honest thing she'd done or said all weekend. She told him he was a good person, which meant she could still recognize what that was, and to let her fall back into the sick charade she'd already become painfully good at spurred a kind of desperation, catching a fool before she stepped off a cliff into a socio hell pit and reemerged as one of them.

The moment he'd spotted that mass of blue hair at the base of a Ferris wheel, frizzed like Kakarot's cotton candy in the sticky air—with Yamcha's arm wrapped around her hips and his palm practically brushing over her ass—Vegeta's mind skipped ahead of the track. Like all the unsanctioned fights he'd been in, the ones spurred by chastising and instigated rage, he blanked out and didn't realize what he'd done until the reactive shouts of bystanders woke him from a hot, angry fury to realize that he'd yanked Bulma so hard that she'd nearly stumbled off her feet, dropping her cup to spatter its contents over the pavement as she caught herself against his chest.

"What the fuck! Vegeta?"

"We're going home," was all he could manage to say. He couldn't read her expression as she stared up at him beyond the wild surprise to find herself suddenly caught in his grip.

"Watch it, Bulma, the fun police is here to arrest you," chided Launch with a merciless laugh.

Yamcha had gotten over the shock of the situation faster than Vegeta or Bulma, and the heiress was jerked back toward him in a kind of tug-o-war as the quarterback pulled her other arm. "Listen freak. Bulma wants to stay with us! If you want to take your little invalid brother and go home, go fucking home!"

Before Vegeta knew what he was doing, he'd dropped his grip on her wrist and knit his fingers into a tight fist that he hooked, harder than he'd anticipated, into Yamcha's unsuspecting face. The shriek Bulma let was enough to jolt Vegeta back to reality, to realize that he'd dropped his classmate with a single swing, laid him out flat so fast that Yamcha didn't even have time to catch his fall and landed awkwardly on his shoulder. The quarterback immediately threw a hand over his face as he wailed and thrashed against the pavement in pain and tried to catch the blood that was oozing between his knuckles from what was likely a broken nose.

The voices that followed rang between Vegeta's ears, in and out and almost all at once.

"Vegeta! What the hell is wrong with you!?" the heiress cried as she bent to Yamcha's aid.

"He's fucking crazy! I told you, Bulma, didn't I tell you!?" Launch said as she grabbed Tien by the arm to keep him from retaliating, likely knowing that if he did, he'd face the same fate as his friend.

Vegeta absorbed it all in a rush as he mindlessly backed away in small steps, regret hitting him faster than he'd hit Yamcha with a sickening, sinking shame, but it was nothing compared to the effect of hearing one voice he didn't anticipate to make a show, and once he recognized it, his stomach plummeted like a heavy stone, dropped straight through the soles of his feet and drilled into the core of the earth when Kakarot shouted, "Whoa, cool!"

Vegeta spun to see the three of them, Kakarot staring with his mouth wowed in a circle, and Raditz next to him with a similar expression. What Vegeta couldn't see behind his cousin's thick mane was Tarble—nothing beyond the wide chocolate eyes that peered meekly from where he piggy-backed over his cousin's shoulder.


	6. Watermelon

**Chapter 6: Watermelon**

They walked toward the car at a clip that forced Kakarot to jog his stubby legs to keep pace. Vegeta barely paused to tear the stuffed ape from the boy's arms that was slowing him down. It seemed like a cowardly retreat, hoping to avoid further confrontation, but the way he'd felt it all again, the convulsive loss of himself for those few seconds was more than enough to scare his instinct from fight to flight—not fear of Yamcha and Tien, of course, but fear of his own damn madness.

Raditz had stopped, squatting a bit to hoist Tarble further up his back when he remarked with a kind of convivial delight, "Dude, that shit is gonna be viral in like a minute! You dropped him without even trying! Sucks I couldn't record it."

His cousin's sudden change of heart was reverential, as if he'd been the one to flatten the academy's QB into a whimpering mole against the pavement with a single punch. If the kid wasn't on his back, Vegeta was sure Raditz would be skipping in circles, and as much as he appreciated the show of solidarity, he was very nearly being carried off with an equal measure of nervous dread. Raditz was right that news of the incident would soon be pinging the phones of the entire student body, and not just them but their parents and faculty.

"Why the hell didn't you just go to the car like I said?"

"You had the keys!" The lilt of his cousin's pitch, whiny and defensive, tainted the truth of the fact. Raditz's didn't have to beg an excuse that they both knew was legitimate. That his cousin felt the need to do so only made Vegeta feel like an asshole and an idiot for not having considered giving the moron his keys in the first place.

The short trek back to the cabin was done in silence, with Raditz refreshing social apps on his phone hoping to be the first to catch the news he was certain would light-up the feeds at any moment and insert his own firsthand perspective in the comment threads. In the backseat, Kakarot napped against the ape, and Tarble mulled out the window with his lips pressed together in a flat line.

As much as his brother's leadened features concerned him, enough to know he should debrief the event, help Tarble sift through the thoughts that had muted him in pensive silence, Vegeta couldn't find the means to configure his own feelings on the subject. His stomach had locked up tight, and blood filled inside his head, undulated against his skull with such thick, heavy pressure, he was sure that if forced to rehash the incident, his temples would rupture at the seams. The resentment and disappointment he felt for the ease in which he'd given in to Yamcha's instigation was punishing, and he was certain that if he'd dared to catch a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror, he'd find his father's eyes staring back.

Of course, Yamcha didn't expect to be bested, dropped so hard and fast that he was now likely coming up with pathetic excuses to override his humiliation and coax every ounce of the heiress's sympathy. Perhaps the foolish, mouthy weakling really thought he'd have the chance to stand-off against him. It was pointless to wonder, however, because the outcome was exactly what the jerk had hoped for: Vegeta lost his cool in front of Bulma, proved to her that he was recklessly unhinged, violent, dangerous… a psycho.

There was something wrong with him, he was certain. To snap like that in a way that was so uncontrollable, almost out of body, without even a remote possibility of reigning in his actions made him wonder if this is how his father felt. The man was obviously ladened with guilt and fear of being found out in the wake of his outbursts, as evidenced by the luxury car Vegeta was driving, but whether or not the acts sprung from the same blinding, recalcitrant lack of inhibition was another question entirely. He suspected it was, and though it wouldn't change how he felt about his father, it begged the question of whether or not he would ever be able to overcome the trait in himself.

Vegeta thrust open the freezer drawer to assemble an ice pack for his aching knuckles, but in a rush to escape from the others, he opted for a bag of peas and carrots instead. Kakarot's game of twenty questions, or statements rather, punching at the air with the same idiotic amusement his brother had postured earlier was further testing his nerves—even as the kid's attention shifted from the fight to the treehouse, trying to nag a solid commitment as to when, exactly, they could go.

"Kat, just chill for a second, man," said Raditz from the living room where he'd already turned on the TV and threw himself into the couch.

Vegeta slunk off toward the bedroom to ruminate on his own miserable existence and ice his hand, leaving Tarble to sit on the rug with his chin on his knees where he pretended to unknot his shoelaces, picking at them with a dull commitment. He'd tucked himself away between the porch's entry and edge of the couch, crouched with the same passive unease he wore after fights in their home, as if trying to make himself invisible. As much as Vegeta hated to abandon the kid, a moment alone, one fucking minute to depressurize his throbbing skull would serve them both in the long run.

He threw himself against the mattress in the darkening bedroom and pressed the frozen bag of vegetables against his hand with a hiss. Nothing was broken, he knew, but it still hurt like a bitch. He stared blankly at the fiery sunset in the painting framed above the dresser, breathing intentionally deep and slow, hoping to disrupt the tension that swelled inside his head by pulling his mind's focus from all the hatred he felt—for his classmates, for Bulma, for his father, and in so many ways, himself—to study the almost luminous licks of paint, wondering how the artist could so successfully make the scene appear to glow.

He wasn't surprised when the door peeked open. His brother stood hesitantly at the threshold, as if now questioning an act that had always been a procedural recourse to his distress. That Tarble even considered the possibility that the one person with whom he could take refuge wasn't available was undoubtedly the worst outcome to have come from the entire, stupid incident. Vegeta could kill them all for the distraction, for ushering him into a state of mind that left him selfishly stewing and hiding from the only responsibility he gave an honest shit about in this world.

"Come on." He waved the kid over with his good hand. Tarble pranced up to the bed and pulled himself up, careful as a kitten because he knew by now not to jump on Vegeta and chance hearing him wail in agony whenever he'd land on a broken rib.

Though his solitude was disrupted too soon, Vegeta was relieved that Tarble had brushed off the mood and didn't appear to fear him, despite that Vegeta was on the delivering end of an act that, at least in their home, always sent them both into a cautious retreat behind his locked bedroom door. Tarble laid down to scoot his body up against him in the twin-sized bed and rested his chin on Vegeta's shoulder.

He stole one more long, indulgent breath before he turned his face to the kid, who playfully reached to plug his nose. Vegeta puffed his cheeks in response before he blew a raspberry, albeit half-heartedly, in Tarble's face to make him smile.

"You know I would never hurt you, right?" he asked. The comical tone from his pinched nostrils belied the severity of the question.

Tarble lowered his smile with a slow, affirmative nod and released his hold on Vegeta's nose to rest his palm on his cheek. He didn't say anything though, and laid in contemplative silence, staring past Vegeta's face at the wall behind him, likely recalling in his head dozens of incidences he should have never seen. As much as Vegeta wished he'd had the luxury of being alone, if even for a few stolen minutes, he'd been caring for his brother long enough to understand that the kid's sense of safety and stability was far more important to defend than his own frustration over high school drama. That he'd betrayed the fact, let a girl infect his head and pilfer his focus, was shameful, humiliating, and weak. He set the frozen food aside to shift from his back to face his brother and wrapped his arm around Tarble's slender frame, threading his fingers into the boy's hair at the back of his head where he'd buried his nose into Vegeta's neck.

They'd fallen asleep, it seemed, because suddenly the room was full of light and the noise of Raditz's rummaging through his bag.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"I don't know about you two, but Kakarot and I are going to hang in the treefort."

Tarble perked up instantly, which was quite a feat for a boy that was normally dead weight once he'd gone down. Even hours after being revived each morning, Tarble was a zombie, mumbling incoherently with half-masted eyelids for hours, to the extreme that Vegeta was often tempted to slip a shot of espresso into his cereal to avoid them being late for school.

Overcome by a second wind at Raditz's proclamation, Tarble tore his face from the pile of drool he left on Vegeta's shoulder and leapt from the bed quick as a rabbit, fully reanimated. Too bad preschool wasn't a late-night romp in the woods.

"_You're_ staying out there?"

"Seems like more fun than hanging back with you," Raditz chided with an air of boredom, scanning Vegeta's pathetic posture where he sulked in bed. "At least until my phone dies," he added as an afterthought.

This was good, fucking perfect! The fact that Raditz was going to be the one to deliver him the free night he'd been craving for years was blowing his mind. He almost didn't believe it was real until his cousin strapped a backpack over his shoulders and clicked a flashlight to life on the porch. But he ruined Vegeta's uncorrupted appreciation when a queer grin spread between his cheeks as he looked to his brother and asked, "Alright boys, you locked and loaded?"

"Yup! Ready!" said Kakarot, who sported a flashlight on a headband and whose palm was wrapped around a device that looked like a giant vial of pepper spray.

"The hell is that?"

"It's for the bears!" Kakarot stated, as if Vegeta was an idiot and bear spray was an obvious accessory for their dimwitted adventure.

Vegeta glanced to Tarble who was struggling to tighten his own flashlight atop his head. He bent to help his brother, while at the same time, looking toward Raditz's excitable features with a weary shake of his head. His dumbass cousin widened his eyes in counter. The white gleam of his teeth almost glowed in the dark as he nodded and smiled like a psychopath, probably hoping for the chance to wrestle a bear.

"Once you get to that fort, you don't come down until morning, you hear me? If you have to piss, do it over the edge! And text me when you get there!"

"Roger!" Raditz clicked his tongue against his cheek and shouted for the boys to follow him into the forest.

Vegeta lingered on the porch, watching them disappear into the black woods until he could only hear faint remnants of their voices, and once those left him too, the moment when he should have felt grateful for the fleeting chance to be alone, truly alone, there was nothing but a hollow emptiness left in their wake. As he stepped back inside the quiet cabin, he wondered what the hell he was supposed to do.

He paced the main floor in circles, round and round, trying to settle an odd displacement of nerves. The bucket list of indulgences he'd imagined entertaining with his freedom, binging movies or video games or books were all repelled by the restlessness of his mood, the equanimity those types of activities necessitated being impossible to summon. Usually, when he was peaking in a fit of anxiety, his brother was there to serve as a distraction. Not as a crutch either, but out of necessity, because the kid always needed tending—to be fed and bathed and comforted. But in one of those _careful what you wish for_ kind of moments, without Tarble's needs to serve as his focus, Vegeta had nothing to distract himself from his own crushing thoughts.

The more he paced the room, the more his useless energy pooled, accumulated in his veins like an unstable element without a viable outlet. He felt as if he'd blast apart under the pressure, and they'd all return tomorrow to find him speaking in tongues and bleeding from his ears. As he considered, briefly, to make a run for it through the woods to catch up to his cousins, knowing that doing so would put him instantly back into the caretaker role he sought for at least one evening to escape, his focus was caught by a bottle of tequila Bulma had left on the counter.

It was a terrible idea. He knew it was the moment the bottle grabbed his attention. The disciplined side of him, the rational one that desperately tried to be the opposite of his father and avoid the same pitfalls, was uproariously disgusted that he'd even consider the shit. But at the same time, the muzzled teen in him was quickly churning out justifications—that he was, for the first time, free to be selfish without consequence, that he fucking deserved it, that indulging once didn't make him his father; it made him human and seventeen. He was allowed to act his age for a night, possibly the only night in the foreseeable future, so why waste it pacing a miserable trench into the Briefs' hardwoods?

Vegeta put his lips to the bottle and tipped his head back. The foul substance burned as it snaked down his throat. He waited a minute, but nothing seemed any different, so he took another swig. Then another and another, until he felt the strange, uncoordinated incapacity he'd felt the time his father forced him to drink.

It was far less satisfying than he'd imagined. Without serving to mute the loud, angry thoughts that refused to cease their recall of the weekend's shitshow of events, instead the alcohol only amplified the noise, rerunning every insult and embarrassing ploy in his head out of sequence in a blurry smear.

Drinking alone could hardly be called an activity, especially one to pass the time, and his ability to pace the yard was becoming increasingly ineffectual with the clumsy way his feet began to stagger, getting caught in each other's way. He tripped up the porch steps, and without the reflexes to properly catch himself, he landed with a heavy smack against his palms and the tip of his chin to witness two bottles roll in perfect unison across the wood planks.

This was bullshit. As he pushed himself up from his stinging palms, he didn't bother to retrieve the bottle from the ground and stumbled into the cabin. He only wanted the night to end and wake up tomorrow under another sun and head home. His father would be gone at least through the week, and despite knowing he'd spend every day with increasing dread, as his father surely would have heard by then what he'd done to Yamcha, if he hadn't already, in the moment he didn't care. He only wanted to be done with this place, sobered up and gone. He threw himself onto the bed and watched the ceiling fan spin around his head as he passed out.

* * *

The sun had sunk below the tree line, yet the stale heat lingered, disagreeably strong and claustrophobic. Bulma, unaware of where they were going when they'd first climbed in Tien's Land Rover, assumed their destination was his cabin or Zarbon's Tavern, but when Tien turned down an unmarked road, she realized they were headed to a place called the Lookout—a stupid name considering it looked out over nothing and was rather a kind of cul-de-sac nestled deep in the forest. The rumor was a man named Popo had purchased the plot for himself and his wife to erect a dream home, but when she'd passed away unexpectedly, he didn't have the will to even turn a stone. The dead-end drive now served as a destination for underage teens to drink and partake in a number of unseemly activities.

As Bulma sat in the backseat, the mild state of shock beginning to wear, it took something of an effort to unlatch her seatbelt. She found it difficult to stop her mind's replay of that vicious jab. The sound of his knuckles landing with a squelched displacement of cartilage and bone turned her stomach with sickening anxiety. Though she'd heard the cruel remark about Tarble that triggered Vegeta's reaction, it didn't make it right. More than that, the way he'd ripped her nearly off her feet seconds before, animosity fermenting in his dark eyes, felt almost predatory, like a bloodthirsty animal snatching up its prey. Perhaps they'd been right about Vegeta, and he was dangerously unhinged.

But to accept that was to admit that she knew nothing about this boy she grew up with and spent half a decade transfixing in wistful fantasies. And seeing him again, if there was one thing she did not question, it was that Vegeta was stressed. For all intents and purposes, he was a teenage parent, and despite playing the part by choice, she sensed a greater motivation than the one he claimed: that he just liked the kid. There was much more to the story than he'd been willing to disclose. Something was desperately wrong, and she wracked her brain for clues that explained his excessive, selfless commitment.

Even before Tarble was born, Vegeta had been a bit of a precocious bore. It would take an extreme effort on her part to pry the fun out him with the jaws of life before he'd give an inch and reluctantly took part in her games.

But this was different than abject pretension. That he'd derail everything he'd worked for to be at the top of his class, was willing to forego guaranteed admission to any university he wanted and balk his father's hopes for his future, all in favor of caring for Tarble didn't make any sense, which meant he was hiding something. With all of the rumors about the little boy, she guessed his secret had everything to do with Tarble's health. Maybe whatever it was that plagued his brother was terminal.

It was with a distracted mind, weighted by morose theories on Vegeta and his family, that Bulma watched Tien gut a watermelon flavored Swisher Sweet with a pocket knife and shake the tobacco into the grass. He smoothed the paper out against the hood of his car and unscrewed the cap of a silver grinder to carefully tap-out weed as replacement.

Bulma listened to the three of them brainstorming their revenge, her uneasy dread evident perhaps in her silence. It was awful the way their minds worked. She couldn't understand the inordinate hate they held for Vegeta, as if his mere existence was an affront. Being upset about a broken nose, she could commiserate to an extent, even though Yamcha deserved some amount of punishment for foolishly insulting a six-year-old, but she'd never support their plan to retaliate.

Yamcha's nose had stopped bleeding, but it was swollen and a little crooked across the bridge, rending his voice with a clogged, nasally texture she found impossible to take seriously. His hand began to stroke over her hip, fingertips brushing against her skin with an unconscious claim, as if despite the distraction of his own supercilious prattle over Vegeta's cheap and lucky shot, deep down he still believed he'd won a cock match, and she was his prize. Bulma had half a mind to swat him off her, but for Vegeta's sake, she endured his unwelcome touch. Whatever they were planning, she needed to hear it, not just to warn Vegeta, but to understand the extent of the warp of their minds. It wasn't more than a day ago that she'd been enamored by these very people, yet now, listening to their soulless, twisted schemes to make the life of a fellow classmate utterly unbearable, she was embarrassed that she'd ever fallen for their seduction.

"Can't find him on any social networks," said Launch, whose face was ghoulishly illuminated by the glow of her screen.

"Shocking. Did the word _social_ not tip you off?" Yamcha mocked.

"Shut up. I'm just thinking... You can't get him back playing his game unless you want to get your ass kicked again, no offense." She stuffed her phone into the back pocket of her shorts, ignoring Yamcha's bristling objection to her claim, and began to pace a little circle. "We have to get him to play one of ours."

"Well, good luck, 'cause I'm sure daddy's PR firm claimed every damn variation of his name on all those apps."

"Who says we need to use his real name Mr. Hailmary6969?"

"What are you guys gonna do?" Bulma found the wherewithal to ask, trying to stifle the concern from her voice.

"Well, sex vids are out, since the weirdo's a prude," Yamcha said in a tone so casual it seemed like a routine tactic that sat at the very top in their toolbox of vengeance.

"That's overdone, and besides, it doesn't land with a dude. Can't tell me you assholes wouldn't just get off on some public vid of yourself banging a broad."

Tien, who had been quietly focused, running a lighter across the skin of the blunt to cement it shut, still nodded along as if he agreed with his girlfriend's sordid assertion. He carefully ripped the excess twist of paper from the tip and popped the other end between his lips.

"Oh!" Launch snapped her fingers. "I've got it. Gotta say though, it's pretty evil… Like we'd need to use proxies kind of evil cause if we get caught, we're fucked." She ran a finger across her throat to drive home the point.

"Whatever, let's hear it," Yamcha said, extending his hand to take the joint that crackled faintly over Bulma's shoulder as he inhaled. His fingers resumed their stroking after he'd passed it to her and began to mingle with the hem of her shirt before they slipped beneath it, and his palm pressed against her stomach to pull her backside flush against him.

It wasn't Bulma's first time smoking with them, but as the heady herb fogged her head, she suddenly felt inverted, as if strung up by her ankles with a stomach full of stones. The sickness wasn't just from mixing the two substances whose compounded effects she learned could spin the head around even the most veteran stoner. More than that was the fact that a week ago, she would have relished the feeling of cozying up to the academy's top athlete, yet now the heat of his hand against her skin triggered a revulsion that was almost primal and left her wondering just how long she'd have to endure before she could artfully deploy a request to take her home without drawing suspicion.

Whatever Launch was plotting, she sensed it wasn't in the realm of the kinds of playful pranks she and Vegeta used to unleash on unsuspecting guests at the Briefs' galas—like triggering remote-controlled fuses on firecrackers they'd hidden behind potted plants at the pool's edge to scare couture-clad guests off their feet and hope they'd fall in. This was serious, and Bulma tried to hide her unrest behind a cloying smile. The way Launch was eyeing her meant that the girl had her suspicions about which team Bulma was batting for, and she wasn't about to reveal her scheme without some assurance that it was hers.

Bulma extended the joint to her and threaded the fingers of her other hand between Yamcha's at her abdomen for show and said, "An asshole has what's coming to him, right?"

"Right," Launch agreed and bugged her eyes as if whatever asinine plan she'd come up with was a spark of genius, so good maybe she couldn't have held it back had Bulma objected. Perhaps she would have forced her to sit in the hot car, oblivious to the fact that it wasn't exactly soundproof, especially with the volume Launch tended to carry.

"So… We make accounts for that nut job. It'll be easy to get people to follow him. But we need to borrow his phone and a credit card without him knowing, plant a trail that leads back to him. That'll be easy with little miss first kiss on our side."

The twisted grin Launch shot her way was a clear threat, suggesting that when the time came, if Bulma refused to flirt her way into an opportunity to snipe Vegeta's personal effects, she'd not just be blacklisted from the entire student body, she'd be their next target. A plan of the unholiest kind was afoot which required her active participation, an initiation of sorts, and though Bulma had no intention to abide, it didn't lessen the dreaded anticipation of learning its full extent.

"We post a few depressing, cryptic posts, make 'em angrier after a week or two, and insinuate that he's gonna do something crazy."

"Like shoot up the school?" asked Yamcha.

"Would you be surprised?"

"Nope. Shit, Launch that's dark as fuck. He'll definitely be expelled," Yamcha asserted.

"Tch, are you kidding? He'll be lucky if that's all he gets."

"You're a cold bitch," Tien said, grinning at her wretchedly as he plucked the blunt from her outstretched fingers.

"It's why you love me."

The arrogant toss of her hair over her shoulder as she threw herself at her boyfriend to shove her tongue into his mouth should have been the last straw to break the act Bulma was struggling to uphold. They weren't joking around. That they'd really try to sabotage Vegeta in a way that was so permanently damaging was hindering her ability to maintain her feigned cool, and hard as she tried, she couldn't think of a way to summon an excuse that was inconspicuous enough to make an exit.

Even if their plan wasn't successful, merely attempting it would ruin not just his reputation, but his father's too. Being the school's black sheep was one thing, being slandered publicly as some attempted mass murderer was another entirely.

While she'd planned to pretend she was on board with whatever harebrained prank they came up with and still tip him off, this was so inexorably horrible, leagues beyond her capacity to even fake compliance. It needled her nerves, making every pore across her skin itch in distress the longer she stood mute with Yamcha's hands casually fondling her torso, watching them. Tien and Launch's slobbering, as if she and Yamcha weren't standing three feet away, sent the boy at her back to drag his fingers further up her shirt, as if bearing witness to their friends' public groping served as consent. The second she felt his palm squeeze around her breast, she snapped, spun around by the sudden kick of her heartbeat, as if it'd been blasted from the gates and was now cantering out of control.

"Don't you fucking touch me!" she shrieked with a potency that felt as if her vocal cords had been ripped in half, and her outrage that had concentrated into her palm deployed across Yamcha's already bruised face with a resounding slap.

"What the fuck, bitch!?"

The aftershock of Bulma's hit echoed through the trees. Tien and Launch detached from each other's scum-sucking mouths to catch it with wide-eyes, before suddenly, Launch's face contorted into something monstrous. The girl's truth was revealed with new clarity, like a mirror defogged, and Bulma could finally see that underneath the flawless pores of her skin were horns, and behind her pretty lips was a sharp, cruel beak.

Yamcha hadn't yet grasped his senses, beyond his initial reaction, and was still holding his palm to his cheek when Launch opened her hideous mouth to berate, "I fucking knew it! I told you, Yamcha, didn't I? I called it! This weird-ass, homeschooled bitch can't be trusted! Fuck you, Bulma Briefs. You're a nobody!"

Hard as it was to feel the burn of Launch's scalding words, Bulma forced a show of confidence with a straight back and arms folded protectively across her chest. "Well, I'd rather be a nobody than associated with you psychos."

"You think we're the psychos? Kami, you really are in love with him, aren't you? Well… Tell you what… You wanna live on freak show island with that angry little troll, be my guest. I ain't gonna stop you. But just know this, princess, nobody gives a shit who your daddies are. They're not gonna want to come within a foot of your fucking plague. I'll personally make sure of it."

It was the one declaration Bulma had feared since the day she'd enrolled, that she'd somehow be marked, not just ostracized because of her father's stature and resented simply by her affluence and proximity to his power. That was a possibility she was prepared for. The greater fear was that because of all the years she spent secluded, she'd be damned by her inexperience with peers, branded an oddity, and treated more like a zoo animal than a person because she lacked the social acumen needed to fit in with a crowd that had been together, probably, since kindergarten. That fear was materializing before her very eyes in the most disturbing fashion. It made the entire purpose of her attending the school obsolete and, quite frankly, terrifying. If they were willing to ruin Vegeta, the son of a prestigious senator, what would they do to her for taking his side?

She wasn't abandoning the world-renowned tutors her father had personally vetted to attend the academy for its sub-par academics. She wanted friends. More than anything, she wanted to live a normal adolescent life, to socialize among people her age. But coming face to face with ones like these—ones that sought so carelessly and malignantly to destroy the life of another person over a little broken nose, that she was certain now, Yamcha fucking deserved—was disillusioning on so many levels that she wondered if she should cut her loses and disenroll. The attack left her frozen without a rebuff. Without ever having been in direct conflict with a peer before, or anyone really, she was slow to react and strum-up a solid defense. Instead, she stood dumbly against the gravel a few feet away with her arms hugged around herself trying not to cry.

"Ta-Ta! Scurry home now little rat. Good luck getting there." Launch shooed her with a wave of her hand.

They really expected her to walk back, knowing her cabin was at least three miles away down the long, unlit road. Bulma opened her mouth to protest, but the pointless degradation of begging for a ride that they'd obviously refuse, forced her to close her lips. Instead, she mustered all the confidence she could to turn from them and strut her way down the drive and into the black woods.

"Hope you don't get eaten by a bear!" she heard Tien shout, followed by the sound of their raucous laughter.

Emerging onto the main road did little to ease the ominous tension that hung in the atmosphere, oppressive as the heat. She felt like a bimbo from a horror film, perfectly staged for failure. Bulma didn't have Vegeta's number, but she tried calling Raditz, whose phone went directly to voicemail. She sent him a private snap, hoping he'd at least check the app, but that he wasn't responding immediately meant his phone was dead.

Nothing but wild forest stood on either side of her where tall pines extended toward the starry sky. The few cabins that she knew existed lakeside weren't visible from the road, tucked down long driveways and thick trees that blocked even the glow of their bonfires. She considered turning down every hidden trail she passed to solicit a ride from the strange residents that perhaps dwelt at the opposite end, but to do so in this state, drunk and stoned out of her mind, would be embarrassing, not to mention risky. She didn't know these people from Adam.

There was nothing to fear on the road; that's what she kept telling herself when every snapping twig or rustle of leaves sent her to lurch ahead, jogging frantically and tripping over the toes of her flip-flops, until she was certain the noise was nothing dangerous and just paranoia conjured by her poisoned head.

Headlights glowed behind her, almost hugging her from behind with welcome relief to melt the constant state of alarm, a distorted feeling that now felt like a stupid overreaction. As Bulma turned to wave down the driver who was already slowing on approach, she swore she'd never smoke again. It wasn't worth the vivid delusions.

But when the car came to a halt beside her, and the driver lowered the window, Bulma almost wished she'd hidden herself in the woods rather than come face-to-face with Zarbon's glowing smile.

"Well hello, little fox. What are you doing all alone out here?"

Bulma stared at him wide-eyed, as if blinded by the insidious glow of his teeth. Her body stalled against the gravel in a frightful seizure, like a doe catching the scent of a hunter, sapping the instinct to run. Instead, she found her feet stuck to the ground in his crosshairs. She could barely manage to improvise a stuttered reply.

"Oh, uh… it's funny… I was... uh, just meeting some friends… you see... and… and I thought you might be them. They're due within the second."

"You're meeting friends on the road?" He quirked a dubious eyebrow.

"Yes. At my cabin... I was attending a _huge_ party at that one, actually," she pointed indiscriminately in the direction of wherever she assumed was a cabin hidden behind an acre of trees. "Sorry if I interrupted your drive. I thought you were them. Like I said, they're due within the minute."

"Right," he grinned. Perhaps her stoned mind was playing tricks on her, but his dry tone and the slits of his eyes as they narrowed suggested he knew she was lying. "You're right up the road. Why don't you text your friends to meet you there, and I'll save you the trouble of walking?"

"Oh no, no, no! You're very kind, but you see… Uh, I love to walk... I love walking. I find it therapeutic, clears the head. And like I said, they're _right_ behind me. _So close_. Any second now! I'm just gonna call them."

As Bulma pulled out her phone to fake a dial, she realized there was nobody to call. She didn't have any fucking friends. At best, her housekeeper in the city would answer, but that would hardly help her if this creep tried anything funny. Her only option was to dial emergency and hope her signal could break through trees to ping a cell tower and diagnose her location. She imputed 9-1-1 into her phone, faking a smile over the top of the device, praying he'd leave before she was forced to hit send. But the moment he shifted his car to park, all sense was purged from the human parts of her head with a sinking horror. The blood pumping in her ears plummeted to the soles of her sore, poorly-clad feet. She darted into the forest like a spooked animal before Zarbon could unbuckle his seatbelt.

Bulma kicked off her sandals and scampered mindlessly through the thick density of trees fast as a fox jetting a hound, unable to discern whether or not Zarbon had the ambition to follow. According to Tarble, bears could run in excess of thirty miles per hour, much faster than Zarbon, much faster than herself for that matter, but she had no choice but to chance it through the forest. She'd only need to cut a quarter, maybe half a mile through the woods before she hit the beach, and from there she could run up the coast to reach her cabin, or swim across the lake to the other shore as a last resort. Bears didn't swim, right? And Zarbon was too prim and pristine to follow her into the murky water, wasn't he? Kami, why didn't she get Vegeta's phone number?

She didn't chance stopping, despite the burning in her lungs, and dodged between the trees, almost ricocheting off their thick trunks as she touched them, ignoring the hard jabs against the soles of her feet as she mindlessly leapt across rocks and buried roots until she spotted the beach ahead. Seeing the sparkles that skittered across the waves in the moonlight felt like sanctity, like watching the gate stretch open at her urban estate. Glitter reflected off the dark waves like the city's lights to make her feel protected the way she did at home by an unwitting herd of guardians bustling up and down bright sidewalks. People... she wanted nothing more than to be surrounded by the safety of people and faces and voices and lampposts.

There was movement behind her, and recognizing the obvious displacement of branches and thumping feet sent her adrenaline to peak, plugged in like a drone, and she shot toward the water's edge, screaming at a pitch that would wake every damn predator in the vicinity. Whatever or whomever was running after her was closing in, and just as her feet met the sand, a pair of arms closed around her.

Shrill cries ripped through her throat as she thrashed against a strong, tightening grip. Yet the voice that shouted back against her ear in a smattering of words she wasn't cognizant enough to make sense of wasn't totally unfamiliar. The limbs that held her weren't furry, nor were they slim and pale like Zarbon. Bulma stopped flailing to force her mind to catch up.

"Kami, princess! It's just me!"

"Raditz!? What the fuck is wrong with you? Oh god! Oh my fucking god, am I happy it's you!" Bulma spun toward the linebacker who'd dropped her back to the sand to puzzle out the confusing encounter, his face almost strained by the effort of deciphering her contradictory response. "I had a terrible night. Can you please not ask questions and escort me home?"

Raditz could be a damn doll when he wanted to be, and they walked arm in arm up the beach without any nagging questions on his part. But it didn't mean she couldn't seek her own, once she felt safe again and found her voice returning.

Raditz explained that he'd been with the kids in the treehouse until they fell asleep and his phone died. That's when he got bored and made his way back, only to find her bursting through the trees toward the shoreline, shrieking as if a horde of zombies were after her brains.

"Where's Vegeta?"

"Sulking like a baby. That'd be my guess."

The lights were still on, she noticed, as they strolled up the steps of the porch, but Vegeta didn't appear to be in the front of the house that they could see through the windows. Bulma nearly tripped over a bottle, but her death grip on Raditz elbow saved her from rolling over it completely. When she let go to pick it up, her brows pinched as she examined the shot or two that remained in a liter that was more than half full when she'd left. Raditz jumped to defense.

"I didn't drink that!" he declared, throwing up his hands as if he mistook her for his mother. The sideways look of disbelief that rolled across her features was meant to amuse him, get the dolt to consider the pointlessness of lying. She didn't give a fuck if Raditz drank her booze, but he was holding strong to his story, and more than that, he appeared to be wholly perplexed by the near-empty bottle. Their eyes locked with the same dubious realization.

"You don't think…?"

"No fucking way. That dude is hardcore. He would never."

Bulma yanked open the sliding glass door. As they both searched the quiet space, she realized she was higher than she'd thought as she lifted a couch cushion like Vegeta was a lost remote control. Raditz seemed to lose interest once they discovered him asleep, or perhaps passed out, in bed. He'd probably hoped to witness his straight-laced cousin's intoxication, and without the thrill, he dejectedly sloughed across the hall to throw himself onto the queen-sized mattress in the boys' room and plugged in his phone.

Bulma remained in the doorway of Vegeta's room, watching the rise and fall of his back. It was obvious that he'd drank that bottle. All the lights were still on, including the bedroom where he laid atop the covers fully clothed down to his tennis shoes, his arm dangling off the side of the bed.

It was strange to watch him sleeping, to witness his features relaxed for once, eyelids fluttering softly in dreams. She wondered what a person like him dreamed about. Did he have dreams that were his own, above his commitment to Tarble? Things he wanted for himself? If he did, she sensed that Vegeta would never see his personal aspirations through, likely even exterminated them with a blow torch the second they'd pop up to scurry across his subconscious. So long as he held himself to the role of his brother's parent, his own life was effectively benched. A part of her wondered if the senator noticed. Their father was busy, always away, a lifestyle she understood in lieu of her own upbringing, but was the man really so absent that he was unable to see his eldest son's burden? Perhaps Vegeta hid the impact. It wouldn't surprise her. That he was so adamant to take it upon himself to ensure Tarble was raised by brotherly love above a nanny's paychecks, was willing to expense his own future to see that his sibling felt nothing in this world beyond the safe and precious existence that Vegeta kept for him was perhaps the most beautifully human thing she'd ever witnessed, from anyone. He wasn't a psycho. He was a bear, and he was protecting his cub from Yamcha's insensitive slurs when he'd hit him. He was protecting her too, she realized now. That's why he pulled her away, because he was trying to save her from the monsters she didn't know.

"I'm really sorry, Vegeta," she said and flicked off the light.


	7. Fireworks

With a snap of his lighter, the fuse flared to life, and the end of its long cord began to crackle toward his fist. Vegeta dropped it to the ground and ran for cover. He leapt over the square-cut hedge that buffered a line between the Briefs' estate and their neighbors' where the heiress was crouched, waiting. The trajectory of Bulma's fireworks was a game of roulette, and though he remained uncertain that bushes would offer much protection, there was some excitement in the gamble. A tincture of gunpowder swept through the air as they watched the long fuse spark and hiss, coiling through the grass like a snake preparing to strike. The heiress wrapped her hands around his arm, pulling on the sleeve of his shirt as she bounced on her knees, squealing near his ear. Vegeta's heart raced, and his muscles tensed beneath her grip, but he didn't throw her off. Even if she was paying him attention, it was too dark to see the reddened flush infused across his face. Besides, her proximity would make it easier to tackle the girl, hold her to the ground should the damn firework fly in their direction. As the flare burned its way to meet the base of the explosive, Vegeta sucked a breath.

A crack, sharp and searing, rocketed him from a deep sleep as if shocked back from a flatline under paddles. Vegeta shot upright, heart pounding, to catch the last remnants of light flicker and fade from the room before they left him in blackness to grope and grasp at the comforter. His body felt frantic and his head disoriented, as if his consciousness was trying to close a gap, shake him back to reality from a vivid dream. Drunken latency left him to survey the space around him whose furnishings flashed in an out of view as the Earth sighed in a low, dissipating rumble. The room suddenly illuminated in bright, white light, and the walls shook with a violent clap of thunder.

"Oh shit!" Vegeta lurched from the bed on ungainly limbs, stumbling over the tips of his tennis shoes as their rubber soles gripped the floorboards to nearly pitch him off his feet. Kami, where did he put his phone? His palms pawed at the mattress until the strobing lights glinted off the glass screen that was tucked halfway beneath a pillow. He darted from the room in an inelegant stagger, bumping into the doorframe, the walls, the couch once he'd made it to the living room to see that all the lights were out—not just turned off, either. Even the microwave clock was black. Outside, the wind howled like a freighter. It bent the arms of every tree against their will, left them straining and creaking, and sent their leaves to thrash.

Vegeta fumbled desperately to unlock his phone and find the right distance for his garbled vision to navigate to Raditz's number, but as it rang against his ear, he began to recognize the dumb hip-hop beat of his cousin's ringtone permeating from behind the door of the other guest room. A wave of relief eased the turbulent churn of his stomach when he realized that Raditz was home, that perhaps his cousin heard the storm approaching and returned with the boys to the cabin. He followed the tune down the hall and pushed open the door to find Raditz sprawled like a starfish, every limb stretched wide across the bed, alone.

The few sickening seconds it took to realize that the kids were stranded in the woods—a six and seven-year-old left unaccompanied in a tree fort in the midst of a dangerous storm—were enough to sober his dulled mind and flimsy limbs to propel him out the sliding glass door, not bothering to close it behind him. Thick sheets of rain lashed sideways to sting his skin and quickly soak his clothes. Lightning webbed across the sky like broken glass followed by cracking whips of thunder. Worse, however, were the howls of wind that seemed to overwhelm everything else, as if the storm's multitude of threats were at war, and the wind was stealing the show over the glamor of jagged lights and their booming encores. It pushed at his back and nearly carried him off his feet as he raced toward the line of trees that danced and swayed to the tune of its grisly chorus.

Though he knew the general direction of the fort, there weren't any paths to go on, especially in the dark, half-drunk, and without Kakarot to guide him. Getting lost was a new odious obstacle for which he lacked more than a prayer to avoid. He ran headlong into the forest, and just as he did so, the erratic beam of a powerful flashlight cut across the tree trunks in front of him. Vegeta hastily glanced back, not pausing a beat, to see the heiress clopping toward him in a pair of knee-high rain boots. Her shouts were smothered in the roaring air and rustling branches, failing to reach him.

He didn't wait for her—not at first, not until the woods grew thick and dark and even the ceaseless lightning was obscured by the crowd of trees that gesticulated their limbs like drunkards, swaying back and forth with every forceful gale. As he crouched at the base of a giant Spruce to wait for Bulma, he could hear them creak and moan and wondered what the chances were of trees this large being uprooted, ripped from the ground to wail in their final throes of death—or perhaps worse and even more likely, the chances of the tree fort coming through the storm unscathed.

Thankfully, she wasn't too far behind. Her light grew brighter, bouncing with her gait before the silhouette of her hooded rain jacket emerged feet away.

"Bulma!" he shouted and reached for her sleeve as she nearly ran past him.

"It's this way!" She cut a path ahead at an angle at least thirty-degrees off from wherever he'd been trekking. Kami, if he hadn't stopped, just as he'd feared, he would have bypassed the kids completely and become stranded in the forest himself.

Vegeta clipped close behind at her heels, focused on the soppy ground where each foot landed, soaking through his shoes. More than the uneven terrain where his feet kept catching on roots, he felt annoyed, almost piqued by the heiress's pace. If she hadn't been wearing the gawdy boots, they might have reached the fort by now. He refused to let his mind imagine what the boys were experiencing in the moment. His brother wasn't exactly a brave soldier, and while Kakarot was as dauntless as they came, he was still just a child whose steel nerves were undoubtedly breakable under real life and death conditions.

"Almost there!" Bulma hollered.

His heart that had been lobbed solidly in his throat since he'd awoken finally floated back into place when the treehouse came into view, still erect; though it was missing many of its shingles. His respite was cut short when suddenly the heiress sprung ahead at awkward gait, hiking up her legs as if she were high-stepping through car tires.

"What's wrong?" Vegeta shouted after her, but she didn't respond, or perhaps she couldn't hear him.

Bulma gave up trying to run in her impractical footwear and dropped to her knees, skidding through the muck like stealing bases. She abandoned her flashlight at the foot of the tree, and as she did, the wild hair of his cousin's silhouette became visible in its beam, kneeling beside her. That's when his heart stopped, skipped entire measures, realizing Tarble was the reason she'd broke ahead. It didn't beat again until he was standing over Bulma's shoulder. She'd already pulled Tarble into her lap and hugged him tightly against her. The boy was hysterical, screaming a mix of terror and agony with his eyes pinched shut, as if he didn't realize that they'd arrived.

Kakarot, whose hand was clasped over one eye, said in a worried tone, "He didn't mean to!"

"He didn't mean to what?" Vegeta asked as he knelt beside them to lay a palm against his brother's forehead.

"He slipped on the ladder!" The boy pointed above his head. The way he held his eye and apologized for Tarble was enough to piece together that his brother must have nailed Kakarot in the face on his way down.

Bulma was muttering to the boy, trying to quell his piercing wails that paused only long enough to draw breath. She pulled his hand off his ankle, examining it carefully under the light. The joint stretched the elastic of his sock, swollen to the degree that there was no longer any distinction between his calf and foot.

"Vegeta, we need to get back. Can you carry him?"

His brother clung tightly to his shirt once he'd scooped him up, his tiny fists pulling at the material like a baby koala gripping his mother's fur. Tarble muted his own cries by stuffing his open mouth with Vegeta's shoulder, teeth and all, his hot breath panting through the fabric.

"It's okay," he murmured several times.

It seemed that as far as the storm was concerned, he was right. The wind had let up, the trees were righted, and only their branches continued to wave with small gusts. Even the rain had called a ceasefire, with only the occasional fat droplets that fell from branches to splatter against his skin.

Bulma took up Kakarot's free hand and began to lead the way. His cousin, ever the fiend for danger, chatted-up the heiress about their adventure. In the tale he delivered, with no shortage of bravado, Kakarot starred as the superhero, and Tarble, a pitiable babe in the woods, played his rescue. To hear Kakarot describe Tarble's panic as the storm closed in was painfully nauseating, as if Vegeta's shame for his neglect could burn a hole through the pit of his stomach. He squeezed the boy tighter. It was the most horrible thing to picture Tarble in that fort, powerless and alone, crying his name on repeat as thunder rumbled ominously in the distance, drawing closer and closer to trap him.

Vegeta's self-flogging guilt, however, was short-lived as they all stopped at once to tune their ears to a sound tolling from beyond the woods and across the vast expanse of the lake where the little town they'd traipsed through earlier that day resided. Barely audible at first, it quickly swelled into a steady continuous note whose meaning they all recognized at once. Even so, it didn't make sense, and they stood frozen, listening to the eerie tone with their heads tipped toward the sky that was mostly hidden beyond the canopy of trees. The only evidence of the storm's existence was left growling behind them.

"Is it broken?" Vegeta asked of the siren. The moment he did, as if their luck in finding the kids mostly intact had all been a practical joke, the wind began to stir and shake the trees above their heads in answer. It picked up fast and sudden, rolling their tops in dizzying circles like it had lost all sense of direction. There was no mistaking what was heading toward them, a fact that was reflected in the whites of Bulma's eyes leaping out at him in the dark.

"Run!" she screamed and yanked Kakarot with a force that nearly floated his feet.

The maze of brush and branches reanimated, reaching out like twisted arms to attack them, and they ran with the tops of their heads bent into the wind to block their lashes.

Tarble's teeth bit down on his shoulder and his voice pulled up his throat to give sound to the panicked breaths he heaved in shorter and shorter blasts. The kid was hyperventilating in his arms. It didn't help that his own heart pumped blood through his veins with enough pressure to rupture every vessel that lay beneath the surface of his skin, much less keep the boy from feeling the way the organ banged against his chest like a battering ram.

He tried to calm his panicked pulse with logic. These days, those sirens could predict a threat at least ten minutes in advance, and they didn't always mean a tornado was imminent, only detected. A funnel cloud—that would sound the alarms. And ten minutes was enough time to make it back to the cabin… at least he hoped. But their three-minute warning signal stopped, which meant the clock was ticking toward a deadline they couldn't entirely trust.

The storm escalated its assault, dropping debris across their path as if from nowhere, branches whose size and speed increased proportionately with the squall's ferocity. They ducked and jumped and stumbled over and around them. There wasn't any worse place to be than the woods, and that was all that lay behind them, more than a million acres of protected national forest. With no other choice but to continue in the direction of the pursuant threat, face it head-on, even as the trees' massive boughs began to creak and groan, they pushed forward with Bulma as their guide.

Physically, Vegeta was far more conditioned to the chase than her and Kakarot, but found the worn soles and soggy stretch of his tennis shoes proving useless against the forest's mossy bed that was slick and thoroughly saturated. Each step was a test of agility and balance, and even more so his resolve—his confidence eroding with every rolled ankle and awkward stumble as he fought to keep from nose-diving into the ground.

The heiress took notice, and despite the deadly threat and responsibility for her own charge who was leashed tightly in her fist, she laid back, unwilling to let him and Tarble lag too far behind. She kept their troop together, never straying more than a few paces ahead with her focus honed-in on their destination. The deftness with which she maneuvered through a minefield was mesmerizing, jerking Kakarot this way and that to find the safest path.

In the deafening wind as they ran, another sound was muffled in its undercurrent as a dull, heavy crack. Just yards ahead, the ground swelled around the base of a pine as it was ripped-up from the earth by the roots. Bulma saw it too and changed course to avoid the path it felled and the domino effect of the other trees it floored beneath its massive body.

It wasn't the first to fall, and others groaned to signal their decent. The heiress pivoted to forge a path that was parallel like fighting a riptide; she steered them off track just enough to give berth to the falling giants. Though toppling trees, it seemed, were the lesser threat. Their roots clung desperately to the earth, resistant to give up and lay down; they were slow to upturn. More dangerous were their severed limbs, projectiles just light enough to torpedo through the air and heavy enough to drop without warning.

The heiress suddenly shrieked and jumped sideways yanking Kakarot with her as a heavy log fell from the sky to land an inch from their toes. Tangled, wet hair whipped across her face, and the fear and doubt with which she met Vegeta's eyes expressed a desire to do nothing more than drop to the ground, cower and take her chances with Kakarot in her arms, hold him against the base of a mammoth cedar and hope it wouldn't give like the others. But that kind of thinking went against the grain of the girl's very nature, and she knew it. Bulma tossed her mane behind her as if daring mother nature to throw another punch.

Bulma was foolhardy, like his cousin, and now Vegeta could see that it was the reason Kakarot idolized her, spoke about her in the same vocabulary as the action figures he'd used to decorate the tree fort she built for him. She'd never give up to play the damsel. The kid's praise was well placed because Bulma Briefs' recent act was just that—an act; it was fake and borne from some post-pubescent, misguided need to be liked. The real Bulma was still alive and well, and that girl was the one who could lead them all out of the woods.

With her eyes glued in the direction of the cabin, Bulma pressed on, and Vegeta followed, each footfall leading them closer to both their refuge and chaser as the forest became a battlefield. Their enemy dropped its deadliest weapons as trees that towered a hundred feet in the air continued to drop from the sky like kamikazes, crushing the life from everything they met on their decent.

It was only thanks to her, their tactical officer, whose knowledge and foolproof compass were just enough to skirt them around the edge of the densest danger that they were alive at all. And as the woods thinned out, and the dark cabin appeared within his sightline, a strange, strangled sob heaved from his chest. Fuck, she'd saved him, saved them all. The dimes of hail that pelted him as they crossed up the lawn, stinging and painful as they were, he was only glad to feel at all.


	8. Thunderhead

**Chapter 8: Thunderhead**

Raditz was mostly asleep when Bulma directed him into the tiny, first-floor bathroom, which, lacking windows, was the safest place in the house. He shuffled over to the bathtub with a pillow stuffed under his arm, grumbling and grunting his discord for being woken as he made himself comfortable. She should have, as Vegeta suggested, left the idiot to suffer Darwin's fate.

Vegeta sat against the opposite wall and cradled his brother in his lap. Tarble's limbs shuddered and teeth rattled like he'd been left in the cold; either in shock or too tired or both to keep up his sobs, instead they hitched halfway up his throat like a bad case of hiccups.

"Here, this will help," Bulma said, tossing a towel at them from the cabinet. She draped another around Kakarot's shoulders and instructed him to play assistant and hold the flashlight while she rummaged for first aid supplies.

Two Tupperware boxes rattled as she slid them across the floor, drawing Tarble's attention away from the crook of Vegeta's shoulder. Every muscle in his body tensed when the heiress sat down beside them and reached for his foot.

"It's okay. I promise I'll be really careful," she assured him, waiting for his leg to relax before she went to work untying his sneaker; then stretching it as wide as it would go, she edged it over his heel with painstaking measure, followed by his swampy sock. Even in the dark, it was easy to see that the swelling and bruising extended across the top of his foot almost to his toes. Bulma examined him by touch, pressing her fingertips lightly as she felt her way around the injury. "Can you wiggle the piggies?"

Tarble wiped his snotty nose with the back of his hand and nodded as he waved the tiny digits.

"Good. How about your ankle? Try tilting it like this." She gestured her hand up and down like a seesaw.

The boy's bottom lip trembled miserably, but he managed to tip his foot the way she'd asked, albeit marginally. Asking him to rotate it in a circle in either direction, however, was another story, and Bulma was met with Tarble's stubborn side as he flatly refused to try. He buried his face in Vegeta's chest and cried tears that he knew were only half real.

Pain was the one exception to the rule when it came to his brother feigning hysterics. The kid was usually honest, but he couldn't stomach a paper cut, much less a loose tooth. When he showed Vegeta his first, he shrieked at a pitch that would impress banshees when he'd tried to twist it from his gums. Tarble refused to speak to him for the better part of a day until he apologized and promised to never reattempt what his brother had deemed a shamefully sneaky attack, which meant waiting until his teeth fell out on their own and praying he didn't choke on them.

Bulma was either more patient or gullible, because she didn't repeat her request and even hushed Vegeta for trying to reason with the kid.

"Vegeta, it's fine. It doesn't seem broken, and even if it was, there's not much we can do about it tonight. I'm gonna wrap it up though. It won't hurt. It will help make it feel better. That okay with you?" She tugged at Tarble's sleeve. Without removing his face from the crease of Vegeta's shoulder, he nodded.

They remained in the bathroom long after the threat was over while Bulma finished tending to Tarble's injury, serenaded by his quiet weeping and the far less quiet snores of their dumbass cousin in the tub. The late hour had subdued Kakarot into a dutiful lamppost, and he did little more than yawn and teeter between the soles of his feet as he held the flashlight.

"Power's back," Vegeta noted, seeing the hallway light flick on beneath the door.

He laid his brother on the couch in the living room where Nurse Bulma quickly went to work, sandwiching his foot between a pile of throw pillows and a ziplock she stuffed with whatever remained in the freezer's ice maker. The kid opened his bleary eyes for a moment to scan their faces, then his bandaged limb as if to be sure they hadn't lobbed it off while he was half-asleep.

With Tarble settled, Bulma turned her attention to Kakarot, tipping his chin toward the lamplight where she could more easily examine the contusion. It circled all the way from the bridge of his nose, across his cheekbone, and over his brow—a red ring around the bullseye of his lid that swelled and hung half shut. Watching Bulma play cutman to his cousin's affliction—one that Vegeta had both dealt and suffered enough times to know the exact shade of purple Kakarot's face would don by the time he returned him to his parents—his nagging guilt compounded to fill him with a darker dread. He slipped outside to pace the perimeter of the porch, like a fish hooked and tossed in a cooler, left swimming in circles as he waited for the inevitable hand to plunge down, grab him up, and deliver a fatal blow.

Getting drunk was nothing more than the last domino to fall in a serial string of shitty decisions. Raditz he was used to, and even his classmates he could handle to an extent. It was Bulma he couldn't manage; each and every misstep was precipitated by her, one after the next until he was so damnably distracted, he'd lost his better judgment. Even so, he only had himself to blame for the fact that he entrusted the kids to his cousin's predictable stupidity. And in the grand scheme of things, even Raditz in some ways earned a pass, because it was Vegeta himself who should've checked the goddamn forecast, like any responsible parent would have. Maybe Bulma was right, and he was in over his head.

"Hey, you okay?"

Vegeta turned towards her voice, nodding as his mouth let escape a contradictory "No."

"Vegeta what's–"

"I didn't check the weather. It didn't even occur to me to check the fucking… He's gonna kill me. Gine's gonna tell him. I'm dead. I'm so fucking dead."

Bulma crossed the floor in front of him to grab his wrists and gently ease his fingers from the barbs of his hair. "Hey, they're both okay. Storms like that can be unpredictable. They'll understand."

Appreciative as he was for her attempt to reassure him, he wasn't stupid. It didn't take a meteorologist to know that storm was coming had he thought to look; only the exact path and severity in which it would manifest was uncertain. And when it came to his father's understanding, her words couldn't be further from the truth. Fearing that he'd breakdown in front of her to relay the fact, he fought his face into a plausible display of stolidity.

"You're just exhausted," she said, her soft, slender fingers sliding from his wrists to twine between his own. She pulled him toward the bench to sit. "In the morning, you'll see. It's bumps and scrapes, and it's not your fault. You seem to keep forgetting that you're a teenager, Vegeta, and you can't be expected to be one-hundred percent perfect. You and I both know our parents aren't! My own would have let me out there at Tarble's age. And they would have probably sent the nanny to retrieve me too had a storm popped up like that."

Vegeta let a laugh despite himself, knowing that was true. As he looked down to his lap where their fingers were threaded, he felt somewhat soothed by the motion of her thumb stroking the crease of his own like it was a pressure point; then there was the weight of her head as she dropped it against his shoulder.

The girl couldn't help herself. For as long as he'd known her, she sought to be close. And as much as her resumed coziness should have rallied his recommitment to a well-honed, scrupulous management of his only priority, the truth was he couldn't help himself either. Angry as he'd been with her, he'd become equally, albeit reluctantly, entranced. And on top of it, now he was eternally grateful. Had she not been there in the woods, the outcome would have certainly proven less fortuitous, perhaps even deadly. They sat for a minute in silence, watching the sunrise break the horizon to ignite the distant thunderhead in a spectacle of brilliant, fiery plumes.

"They look like your smoke bombs," Vegeta commented on the clouds. "Like the one you put in Mrs. Satan's purse at the summer cocktalian."

Bulma's head shot up from his shoulder. She wagged it back-and-forth in denial, her grin exuberant and teasing. "That was you! Vegeta that was _all_ you. Your idea. You did it. That was you!" Her finger jabbed between his ribs, as if the action could jog his memory.

Perhaps it had been his idea; though it didn't seem like a prank he was capable of enacting all on his own, not even before his mother died and Tarble was born, but he couldn't remember what he'd been like back then. "I find that hard to believe, but if it was me, it was only due to your terrible influence."

"Fine! I'll humbly accept the award for influencing you to be fun every once in a while."

Unaware of the smile and simper he bore on his face watching her gloat, he noticed it the moment her mirrored expression had faltered and slipped into something peculiar—a look that hung her pretty lips with gravity and dulled her big, bright eyes with worry.

"Vegeta, I have to tell you something." She dislodged her hand from his to wring her own together, staring down at them in a way that suggested whatever had suddenly provoked her conscience to action was shamefully important; though Bulma Briefs was far too audacious to speak into her lap and dragged her focus back to meet him. "First, just to clear the air, I want to apologize for everything this weekend. I've been a pretty shitty host. I didn't help you with the boys, and worse, I didn't stand up for you when those guys were–"

"Forget it, Bulma. Yamcha's mangled face should tell you that I don't need anyone to stand up for me."

"That's not… Look, what I mean is, I'm sorry that I put you in that situation to begin with. I'm an idiot, and I should have listened to you when you warned me about them because you know them. And you were right by a thousand percent."

While he was tempted to ask her what brought her to this conclusion, besides self-gratifying curiosity, he didn't really care. It didn't matter. The apology, as much as he deserved one, he hated it all the same. It deflated the mood, a fatal puncture in the fantasy he'd let himself indulge for a few, selfish minutes: snuggling up with a girl to watch the sunrise. Not just any girl either—his history with Bulma Briefs had touched every edge of the spectrum. As kids, he'd always been annoyed by her forwardness, forcing friendship when he only wanted to be left alone. But she'd worn him down, and despite his foggy memory when it came to the details of how fun he was or wasn't around her, there was no question Bulma was the closest thing to a friend he'd ever known. And now, meeting her again after a more than five years hiatus, she managed the feat all over again. Only the title of friends seemed to fall short of what the foolish side of him wanted, even for just a few, pathetic minutes while his brother slept.

"They were planning to sabotage you." Her usually cheery features were burdened by a concern that was unwarranted because, as she'd pointed out, he knew the fools, and it wouldn't be the first time he'd been threatened.

"What else is new?"

"You don't understand. What they were plotting was reputation homicide."

"How?" he asked, his curiosity giving way to interrogation.

"On the internet. They were gonna impersonate you with fake accounts and paint you as some sort of deranged incel, create manifestos and shit to suggest you were unstable enough to do something crazy. Even steal your credit card and phone to plant evidence."

"They told you that? They're fucking dumber than I thought."

"Because they told me?" she asked almost hopefully.

It wasn't what he'd meant, but the fact that she thought so was worth a hell of a lot more than an apology. The visible relief that uncinched her worried features into a face he recognized had him slip a white lie.

"Yeah, of course. But even if they didn't tell you, that plan has so many holes, they might as well shoot themselves. Do they know who my father is and the kind of surveillance I'm under? How would they make accounts and use my name without alerting the horde of reputation management experts my father has in his employ? Much less, how did they plan to unlock the damn device? Or use my credit cards, which are his by the way, without his people noticing? They track every goddamn penny I spend."

For once the tight ship his father ran to track him proved useful. He was almost sorry his classmates couldn't attempt their scheme because he would have relished in watching them get busted.

"No idea. I don't think they got that far. They would never try it now because they know I'd tell you. But, that doesn't mean they still won't try to get revenge somehow."

"I'll be shaking in my patent-leather oxfords first day of school," he mocked; the reminder of which, like some kind of personal D-day, reassembled her dreaded expression. "You shouldn't be worried either."

"Not if I disenroll."

"Don't do that. Why would you do that?"

The heiress, it seemed, hadn't just ratted intel; she really did stand-up to them, for him, at the expense of her own reputation. The consequences of doing so, especially for someone as sheltered as Bulma who wasn't used to navigating the politics of a premiere academy, would prove miserable. But she'd get over it. She had more tenacity in her pinkie toe than those morons could scrape together from their entire cabal of impossibly dumber sycophants.

"Besides them promising to make sure that everyone at the academy hates me? Gee, I dunno."

"You don't need friends."

"Maybe _you_ don't, but I do! Sometimes I think we should have switched lives. Let me be raised by a hotshot politician, and let you be the science nerd tutored at home. You'd probably love the isolation."

Vegeta tried not to let his face show the icy horror her suggestion provoked as his mind flashed through every strike against his mother, a small woman like Bulma who wasn't physically capable to defend against his father's attacks. No doubt, he'd have flourished in her household, but the image of her in his, as soon as she'd summoned it into his head, his subconscious triggered to life and sought to protect her from the mere specter of his father laying a hand on her, and he suddenly found himself turned in his seat facing her with his arm wrapped around her shoulders as if blocking a phantom threat.

The heiress's eyes bugged wide at the maneuver that, as her brows began to twist, he could see left her scanning her short-term memory for what exactly she'd said to invoke an awkward come-on. It was the only logical conclusion she could draw, and he had no choice but to play it off, like he'd meant to throw his arm around her, though perhaps in condolence.

"Bulma, there's hundreds of kids at that school. Those three idiots don't control everybody, despite what they'd have you believe. You'll make plenty of friends," he said, picking up the conversation as naturally as he could manage, relieved when he felt the girl's posture relax under his stiffened limb.

Whether it was the fact that his arm remained flexed in rigor mortis, or that she knew him well enough to be skeptical, she asked in a tone that sounded sad and dulled with preemptive defeat, "But what about you? If we pass in the halls, are you gonna pretend you don't know me or are we still friends?"

"I don't have–"

"Time for friends." she finished his sentence. "Because of Tarble. But what if I helped you with him? I'm good with kids; you saw that! I'm smart, way smarter than you are, and I could help him with his homework. What do you have to lose?"

Her slight was so smooth and so Bulma that he almost smiled. But her proposition, if that's what it was—friendship in exchange for playing house with his brother—while in any other circumstance was an obvious win, it would only put his, and more importantly, his brother's wellbeing in jeopardy.

Vegeta getting close to anyone—especially someone with as much clout as the daughter of a corporation his father depended on as one of his biggest donors—the man would vehemently disapprove. And there were more reasons, at least from his father's calculated litany of excuses, than his fear of being found out for who he really was. But Vegeta couldn't explain that to her, nor could he push her away, not with the way she'd settled against him.

Her hair was mussed and tangled in dreadlocks beneath her head where she'd tipped it to rest against his knuckles. Fuck, he was screwed. While Bulma would always be objectively beautiful in whatever stupid string bikini she forced him to tie and a layer of mascara, this version of her was the real one—when she was a goddamn mess and had the gunk racooned beneath her eyes and didn't care. It was the version that wasn't compensating for anyone, the self-assured, give-no-fucks tomboy he remembered.

More than anything he wanted to tell her yes, or if he was being honest, that friends was a far cry from what he actually desired. Even if he was able to be near her, friends wasn't something he could settle for. Friends suggested that he'd be there for her when she did find her own academy clique and started dating some lesser fool among them. That scenario necessitated a state of mind that was far too evolved from his own, and imagining it was enough to bury his reluctant denial and instead deliver a vague response that wasn't yes or no.

"You want to tutor my brother? Seems kind of pointless when he's not even in kindergarten. He doesn't have homework besides coloring inside the lines and singing the alphabet."

"He says he starts this year! Kindergarten is when they start to learn to read, right? Swear to Kami, I'll have that kid's face buried in Harry Potter before the other kids have learned C is for cat."

What she suggested, even if it was a strange condition to tack on a friendship, offering to tutor his brother on its own was genius, so much that his father couldn't deny his logic if he took her up on it. Bulma Briefs had learned from the world's best, and as she was so quick to jab, even as a junior, she was quite possibly smarter than him, which wasn't anything to thumb at considering his was the reigning GPA in the region's most prestigious academy. Goddammit, she was smarter even without knowing the full extent of her brilliance—a brilliance that he was aware, at least in the back of his head, would blow up in his face even as he conceded to it.

Keeping a secret on two separate ends wouldn't last more than a week once they got back to school, and even if his father, by some miracle or twisted approval of pedigree condoned a relationship with the daughter of Capsule Corp., that was only half the problem. The real problem was that he was unwillingly willing to fall for this girl, and she was smiling at him. His perfectly concentrated mind that for years was honed on the singular goal of securing Tarble's future was instead being siphoned by a pretty face and fucking hormones. He was watching his own car wreck and wasn't doing anything to stop it.

"Geta!" As if to grind the axe deeper into his skull, Tarble had woken up and called for him. Though when he made to stand, the heiress shoved him back.

"You stay here. I'll prove it." Bulma was already bounding inside before he could object.

Vegeta hovered by the door to watch the show, trying to bury both his amusement over a situation he knew was going to be perfectly horrible and his guilt over putting Tarble through another round of needless stress. But it was too good to intervene, and though he couldn't see his brother's face, the moment Tarble found Bulma standing over him strapped with an eagerness the boy would be far too sour to endure with a modicum of class even after a solid night's sleep could only be that much more entertaining when he'd had nearly none.

"What do ya need?" Bulma chirped at him.

Tarble didn't attempt a response and twisted from his precarious position, enfeebled with a foot propped on two feet of pillows, to glare at Vegeta in the doorway.

"Sorry, T. You're gonna have to let her have this one."

"But Geta, I have to go to the bathroom!"

"Oh, that's all? Easy!"

The boy's eyes pulled so wide, Vegeta envisioned them popping from his skull and rolling across the floor as marbles when Bulma hefted him into her arms and carried him into the space. Raditz was still passed out with his hair draped over the edge of the tub, oblivious to the bright light she flicked on with her elbow. The heiress carefully set Tarble in front of the toilet to stand on one leg, but when she tried to assist him further, guiding his hand toward the ledge of the sink for balance, she found her fingers in range of his snapping teeth.

"Damn, dude! I thought you were a vegetarian," she said, retracting her knuckles. When Tarble only continued to frown at her, unmoving, she asked, "You need help with your pants, bud?"

"No! Just go away already! I don't want you to see my wiener!"

That was just the kind of comment to draw the heiress's eyes into a perfunctory roll. "Kid, you really need to get out more. Your brother is a very narrow influence."

She couldn't see the sneer Tarble shot at her back, but it held enough venom to redeem him and Vegeta both for the insult.

Bulma hopped toward him in the hallway, a conniving grin stretched across her lips and pointer fingers ready to needle him. Before they made contact with his ribs, he lazily caught her wrists, feigning to hold off the heiress's playful assault. He backed himself against the wall, his hands moving with hers, invoking the barest pressure like a magnet of the same pole whenever the tips of her fingers drew close. Vegeta was mildly aware of his own laugher that petered as the heiress pivoted tactics. Her arms went lax, and her giggling slipped into a hum. She pressed herself against him and set her chin atop his shoulder, eyelids closed in an extended blink as if the stress of the night had finally caught her.

Vegeta knew better. The heiress wasn't tired as much as she was baiting him, sussing out his reaction to her invasion of his well-guarded fort. Embarrassing, awkward diffidence was only the outer wall, and she'd been chipping away at it all weekend, so successfully that he managed to let go of her arms to wrap his own around her in an embrace that was light and rigid and reluctant all at once.

As much as he wanted a conventional relationship, he knew that once she'd gotten through his first defense, she'd immediately set her sights on the next one, and he was delusional if he thought he could contain her. He was already crumbling. His head tipped to rest against the wall inches from her own, watching her eyes drift back open, wondering if she was ballsy enough to force a kiss again because he certainly wasn't. At best, he was capable of not throwing-up on her in a fit of anxiety.

Bulma only smiled through closed lips. An almost indiscernible flit of her pupils toward the open bathroom door, as if she could read his mind, was enough to remind them both that a six-year-old was pissing a few feet away. She did, however, return his stiff embrace, sliding her arms beneath his to tie at his waist, and though it wasn't the same as kissing, he'd admit it was a relief. The way she nuzzled her face into his neck twisted his nerves inside his chest, nerves that were already shot thanks to a day and night that made Hell itself seem like a vacation. But it felt good to be hugged, something he didn't even know he needed until it was happening, a different kind of hug from someone that wasn't Tarble and instead was a girl his age whose hair smelled like rainwater and coconuts. Just as his own grip finally relaxed enough to pull around her, however infinitesimally, a whine interrupted the moment, one that Vegeta sensed contained more layers than simple stress and over-exhaustion; though perhaps it was his own projection of guilt.

"Geta, I'm really hungry!" Tarble had managed to hobble over to the doorway on one leg. He milked his condition, playing the pathetic puppy card he knew would steal Vegeta's attention, with his bottom lip puffed-out, pouting.

Bulma reanimated with a refreshed commitment to the role she was vying for as she tore her head up to exclaim, "I can cook!"

The brothers cocked their heads dubiously as the heiress scampered into the kitchen.

"Bacon?" Bulma tossed a package of meat onto the stone counter to further goad a child who already disliked her for the very fact of her constant teasing.

"No! Tell her!" Tarble scolded, pounding his fists against Vegeta's shoulders as he carried him into the space.

"T, she knows. She's messing with you. You tell her that her jokes suck."

Tarble managed to collect himself to a degree once Vegeta set him on a barstool at the counter, enough to inform the heiress with a haughty lift of his chin, "Pigs are smart you know, just like we are."

"They _are_ smart," Bulma agreed, tipping her head thoughtfully. "Would you settle for cereal? Or waffles? We have a waffle maker, but that's a bit beyond my skill set. Eggos?"

"You said you cook."

"You caught me, little dude. There's a chance I was embellishing. We can test the theory, but it's gonna be garbage. Microwave or toaster or cereal, take your pick."

"Um, Eggos, I guess."

Even the idea of the girl tossing frozen waffles into a toaster was a suspension of the boy's belief in her capabilities, and he narrowed his eyes as if trying to gauge the toaster's settings across the counter. Perhaps he and Tarble really were too narrowly cast, as she'd claimed. Tarble, though he had his own preferences and a system of beliefs and morals that were advanced beyond his years, in many ways still worked within the framework of Vegeta's own. This whole anti-meat obsession was relatively new and something he would never adopt for himself, as hard as the kid tried, but the way in which Tarble stuck to his guns read the same. If Vegeta continued raising him like a miniature version of himself, refusing to expand the kid's worldview beyond his own insecurities and aversions, Tarble would turn out the same only worse—a hermit, just like him, but far too weak and sensitive, which in the real world where life was either eat or be eaten, Tarble was sure to be devoured.

The heiress set his waffles before him alongside a jug of real maple syrup, but Tarble didn't like sweets so much in the morning, and as he bit into the unadorned, lightly toasted disk of what essentially held the same taste and nutritional value as a piece of cardboard, her eyes stretched wide as if she was watching an extraterrestrial eat a shoe.

"You wanna put something on that? Peanut Butter? Anything?"

"Peanut butter?"

"Oh goddammit, Vegeta. Please tell me he knows what fucking peanut butter is—pardon my French, kid."

"I like peanut butter!" his brother answered for him, thankfully, because he couldn't stand the way Bulma was looking at him, running a palm down her face to reveal her shock and horror at all of the experiences she assumed Tarble, by virtue of being raised by Vegeta alone, was deprived of—not that the girl could talk, being sheltered herself.

"We've got the essential food groups covered. Thanks for asking."

"Kid, if you've never put peanut butter on a waffle, you haven't really lived." Bulma carried on with Tarble as if Vegeta wasn't there, rummaging through the cupboards in search of condiments for which she clearly didn't know the location.

She finally found what she was looking for and slammed what appeared to be a liter of peanut butter before his brother's face.

"No regrets," she said and unscrewed the cap.

Tarble ripped a waffle in half to dunk inside the tub she tilted in his direction, analyzing the concoction as if it was a discovery perhaps worthy of the nature programs he watched with obsessive focus. The moment he bit the thing, his face split into a smile. It didn't make any sense. The only difference in the toast Vegeta coated with the stuff was the texture and the fact that he fed the kid whole, sprouted grain, yet this crap somehow deserved a Nobel Prize.

"What are you doing next weekend?" Bulma asked, turning her attention to him once she'd effectively glued his brother's lips shut.

"Why?"

"Would you wanna come back?"

"Yeah, but uh, that's up to T." Vegeta looked to his brother. "It's your birthday. You wanna spend it here?"

A look of the most unfortunate dismay fell across heiress's face as her lips flattened beneath the span of her already large eyes. It was a little funny. Eager as she was about Vegeta's willingness to return, what she hadn't expected was the goofy antagonism she'd instigated between herself and his baby brother to come around and bite her. All of Bulma's chips, it seemed, had suddenly landed in a vat of peanut butter. Despite the heiress actually saving them back in the woods, that substance was the only thing that placed her back in Tarble's fickle graces.

"We can stay?" he chirped in an excitable pitch that surprised him and Bulma both. "Kat too?"

"Not today, next weekend," Vegeta clarified, adding for safety, "Kakarot can come, I guess. As long as I don't have to drive him back and forth. Maybe we'll stay for a while."

"You'd stay for more than the weekend?" asked Bulma with a fervor that matched his brother's.

"Maybe. I dunno. It's better than the city."

"And daddy's home," the kid added, almost absently, like it was a random notation in the back of his tired brain that popped up unconsciously to diagnose Vegeta's internal thoughts, or maybe just expressed his own relief at not having to be near their father on his birthday. With what Vegeta had done to Yamcha, and Kakarot's black eye to serve as the mangled cherry on the weekend's spoiled cake, Tarble's birthday weekend wasn't going to be fun for either of them.

Regardless of his brother's motive, Vegeta fought the impulse to toss his hand over the idiot's sticky mouth. Tarble's lips were so coated with peanut butter that it would have been more efficient had he stuck his face directly into the tub rather than bother with waffles as a medium. Vegeta wished he had done just that rather than incite him to glare at the kid, as if a six-year-old was actually capable of reading his stiff, murderous eye gestures and translating them into shutting the fuck up. He knew their stakes, or at least Vegeta thought he did.

"So spend your birthday with your dad and come up after," Bulma said, misinterpreting his brother's comment for normal chummy, familial sentiments.

Thankfully, Tarble's mouth was stuffed with another bite of goo, but he still managed to scrunch his nose with disgust and shake his head, a gesture that prompted the heiress to turn towards Vegeta curiously. The way she seemed to penetrate him made him feel transparent, as if he were some kind of inside-out boy whose skin was see-through and she could make out all of the exorbitant breaks and fractures that left scars across his bones. Vegeta did his best to cast his face into a mold of expressionless nothing, like some defiled Roman statue without a head, but the moment Tarble's lips smacked open again to clarify, "Daddy's mean," his head snapped back onto his shoulders and his act gave way.

Vegeta's palm hit the counter with enough force to rattle the plate that sat before the kid as he shouted Tarble's name.

His brother lurched upright in his chair, eyes drawn wide, like he'd been struck by a cattle prod. The instant Tarble regained enough sense to register the origin of the thwack and the fact that he was its indirect target, his composure melted from his face with a consistency that mirrored the peanut butter left dripping from his hot waffle. Vegeta yanked the boy into his arms just as he began to scream.

He hadn't meant to frighten him, but he was scared himself that Tarble, in his compromised state, wasn't thinking clearly and would out them both. Not that a six-year-old should have to carry the burden of their family's darkest secret, but it was the way of things, and the kid had been doing just that successfully since the day he was born. It was sleepless delirium and shot nerves that left the boy exposed to his own natural instincts, which were entirely honest. His comments wouldn't have drawn more than Vegeta's camaraderie and comfort had they been alone—a shared eye roll, the heavy, drape of his arm across his shoulders, a full-blown embrace if he seemed weepy. But they weren't alone now. Tarble knew it, yet even as Vegeta hugged him to his chest, he failed to maintain control and instead spiraled out of it.

"I don't want to go home! I hate him! I don't want to go!" he shrieked on repeat through his tears, flailing in Vegeta's arms like a wet fish, smacking at his face and tugging at the collar of his t-shirt.

Bulma's eyes enlarged the same as he felt his own, likely reconsidering her offer to help with the demon child whose voice was hitting a pitch that only casting directors for campy poltergeist films could appreciate.

"I've gotta deal with this," he explained, unnecessarily, watching the heiress rapidly nod. As he strode toward the bedroom, trying to wrestle Tarble's slaps away from his face with one hand. He caught his youngest cousin's gaze, frowning over the back of the couch with one, purple eye swollen completely shut.

Vegeta dropped Tarble to the bed to let him writhe in a fit against the mattress. He could hold him down, but was reluctant to do anything because it wasn't clear what the kid wanted, or needed, or even who he was most upset with. Their relationship, as deeply bonded as they were, wasn't perfect. They had their daily tiffs and the occasional passive-aggressive argument that stretched for days until the least stubborn of them gave in, but nothing like this.

As Vegeta stood next to the bed watching Tarble—deeply red-faced, screaming more than crying as he balled his fists into the comforter, practically spinning it around himself like a homemade straight jacket—he wondered if the day's events had perhaps broken his brother, tipped him off a ledge and made him crazy, like those stories of perfectly normal people who took a hit of weed and emerged from their high as schizophrenics.

Once Tarble had managed to inadvertently roll himself into a cotton croissant, his cries subsided into heavy gasps, swelling against the comforter's cocoon with the force of every breath. He stared blankly across the room, launched from Planet Earth to whatever dimension he always escaped to inside his head.

Vegeta laid down at his back to drape his arm over the puffy blanket and stuff his nose in the kid's hair; the scent so familiar and consoling often served to downgrade his own anxiety whenever it threatened to pitch. Tarble smelled the same since he was a baby, like clean laundry even if he hadn't bathed in days. The science behind it, he didn't want to know, because it would only tarnish its purity, put a deadline on all the selfish ways Vegeta used his brother to calm himself. He couldn't hold on to Tarble forever. The tiny boy was going to grow up eventually, and soon he'd have to find alternative means for comfort.

"I'm really sorry, T," he said, a blanket apology that couldn't, in his own mind at least, befit the severity of injustices he'd forced his brother to endure. It was the same, useless regret their mother whispered against his own neck when he was Tarble's age; though the circumstances then were slightly different. While she may have been afraid for their lives at times, the irksome part he could never understand, the part he knew bound her to his father above her fear of him was that, despite everything, she was still very much in love. Vegeta was only a coward.

Tarble's breath slowed and lifted, streaming shallowly as if asleep, but he wasn't. His voice broke the silence in a tone that was quiet and so even that it seemed ageless, almost robotic when he stated, "You shouldn't go home."

It seemed he'd underestimated his brother's bravery. Not lake monsters or jet skis, pesky heiresses or tilt-a-whirls, bears or black forests, sprained ankles or thunderstorms, tornados or falling trees, not even his own displays of violence could scare Tarble for very long. Only their father could be so esteemed to earn his brother's constant, abject fear, and not even out of fear for himself. It existed on Vegeta's behalf.

"I know," he said. "He won't be there. I'll show you his schedule again if you don't believe me. We'll leave long before he gets home. This shit will blow over, eventually. But you gotta keep it together, man." He squeezed the kid tighter against him. Tarble sighed heavily with a kind of mixed bag of defeat that suggested he knew he'd fucked-up with his outburst and that Vegeta was throwing sugar on an outcome that wasn't going to be so sweet, no matter how long they deferred their father's temper. "If we come back here, you're sure you don't mind hanging out with Bulma?" Vegeta asked, testing the water.

"She's weird."

"Yeah, well, so are you."

"You just wanna lick her," stated Tarble in a tone that was so confident and matter-of-fact, it could have passed for a lecture in his sex-ed classes.

Lick her? The fuck? Kami, the kid needed to ease-off of Animal Planet and watch porn. Not porn, obviously, but sitcoms or something age-appropriate with human romance, or he'd end up as one of those psychos trying to get a marriage license for him and some pet goat.

"That's what Raddy says," his brother clarified. "You wanna lick her tongue."

Ah… Puzzle solved. Now there were two reasons to murder his cousin.

"It's not licking, and that's not… Goddammit! I don't–"

Besides correcting his cousin's gross incompetence that, gods knew why, thought teaching the young boys about making-out was appropriate—Vegeta didn't know what, exactly, he was failing to stutter and explain to Tarble, not knowing himself what would come from pursuing a relationship with the heiress. The tutoring plot he'd envisioned an hour ago to hide a romance, if that's what developed, was at best a stop-gap that wouldn't last past the first day of school if he was lucky. Someone would rat him out, Raditz being the most obvious culprit, if not Bulma herself.

He didn't know how close she was with her parents, but she always spoke well of them, especially her mother, which meant they were perhaps close enough that she would discuss her love life. If that was the case, Panchy Briefs, at first whiff, would be too giddy to inform his father through sing-songy cooes and batting eyelashes that their children were an item. Though the more he thought on the notion, he wondered if it could actually prove beneficial. Bulma's mother and his father had been skirting around the temptation of hooking up themselves, even when his mother was alive, and if they hadn't already, perhaps living vicariously through their children would satisfy the weird sexual tension that surrounded their parents whenever they happened to cross paths at parties.

There were so many question marks. Above his father, was Tarble. None of it meant anything if his brother didn't like Bulma too. But Tarble could be wooed eventually, if the source was legitimate. Tarble could sniff out bullshit the same as his beloved pigs could hunt truffles. A bad first impression was just that, because the kid didn't hold grudges for long unless they were valid.

The biggest gamble Vegeta feared, the one that made the entire endeavor an absolute bullshit distraction was if Bulma herself wasn't interested in something serious. He wasn't about to stake his brother's future on the heiress's whims, but it wasn't like he could ask her out of the gates just how serious she was or wasn't about him without seeming clingy and desperate. Hell, maybe _he'd_ be annoyed by _her_ after a few weeks.

Best case scenario, if she was serious, if they both were, if he could trust her—when the time came for him and Tarble to escape their father's sphere of influence, whatever form that took, Bulma had the resources at her disposal to help them, far more than he could conjure on his own. It was risky, and it meant eventually telling her the one secret he swore he'd never let leave his immediate family. But he'd known the girl since they were kids. Regardless of a relationship, even as friends, Bulma—the one he'd grown up with and avoided at parties, who in his memory had a shameless honesty about her, an unbridled capacity to only be herself—that Bulma would help them.

"G'night, Geta." Tarble sighed against his forearm as if he could hear his thoughts spinning and meant to alert him to the fact and shut them down.

"It's morning, T."

"G' morning, Geta." His brother's tone was too cheeky to be taken seriously, and Vegeta had to marvel at the fact that he'd exorcised himself on a dime, at least enough to joke around.

"Shut up and sleep, T."


	9. Road Trip

**Chapter 9: Road Trip**

His phone was dead by the time he woke up, but outside the window, the eastward shadows that stretched beneath the mangled trees and busted branches said it was well past noon. Thankfully, none of the thick limbs had landed on his car, but there were plenty of dime-sized craters indented across its roof and hood—one more lousy dilemma to add to his growing list of atonements.

Vegeta packed his belongings and left Tarble to sleep, open-mouthed and swaddled inside a roll of blankets. The folksy theme from _Adventure Time_ played from the living room where he found Kakarot watching television through one eye, the jug of peanut butter clamped between his thighs and a spoon in his hand, licking the substance like a popsicle. The meager acknowledgment he offered Vegeta with a split-second flick of his head prompted a tangle of blue hair to pop-up from the adjacent wing of the couch. Bulma peered at him over the back with a worried, expectant interest, as if hoping he'd relay both the reason and the outcome of his brother's blowout. It wasn't the kind of thing he was prepared to explain, much less lie about, especially not in the presence of his cousin.

"Are you packed, Kakarot? I was instructed to have you home before dinner."

"My stuff's in the treehouse," he said without removing his eyes from the glowing rectangle.

"Shit. Well, do you need it? I'm not going back out there today!"

Kakarot's disinterested shrug, fortunately, said no. Vegeta ordered the dolt to rouse Raditz and be ready to leave in ten before he slipped out the porch door to bring his own bag around the house and stuff it in the trunk of his car.

Seeing the storm's destruction in the light of day, while it wasn't certain that a tornado had actually formed, it was clear that whatever they'd experienced last night was dangerously close. Debris was thrown across the Briefs' lawn like a next day battlefield with branches up to twice his size, and a scan of the forest's perimeter proved just how lucky they had been. The perfect, vertical columns he'd admired the first day were now tipped at every angle. Gigantic mounds of dirt and tangled roots, many of which were at least ten feet in diameter, displayed the underbellies of massive, upheaved trees. The heiress's precious jet ski was missing, likely banging against rocks a mile down the coast, and the speedboat was tipped halfway of its lift. At least the house was intact, but even that, like everything else, the Briefs had both the insurance and the means to replace.

Though the same facts were true about his car, he couldn't help but fear he'd be blamed for the damage, as if his father would've expected him to lay across its roof to absorb the hail himself. Nothing he did was ever quite right, hard as he tried; there was always something the old man could unearth to criticize. Even getting his cousins home ten minutes late for dinner, if Gine mentioned it, would be enough to earn him a scolding string of texts, or a phone call if the timing was right.

Vegeta meant to hasten the parade along, knowing the kind of putzs he was dealing with, but as the backdoor snapped shut behind him, his eldest cousin's voice carried down the hall with a remark so vapidly senseless, it fanned the embers of his smoldering rage, threatening to reignite it.

"Holy shit, Kat! The hell happened? Ya get in a fight or somethin'?" The question was endowed with enough enthusiasm and wonder that Vegeta felt his sentiments quickly careening down a steep, fast slope, a boulder aimed at the ultimate source that had set last night's disaster into motion.

Kakarot's goofy giggle responded without explanation, likely too tired to doctor a tale worthy of his exorbitant daydreams.

Blood rocketed into Vegeta's head with a kind of pressure he was sure would fracture the plates of his skull and explode them across the pinewood floor, and he stopped himself at the mouth of the living room to breathe and count his way down to a base level of self-control. Familial love had nothing to do with holding back from his baser instincts. And while Kakarot and Bulma's presence provided some measure of restraint, what he feared more was the hole he'd already dug for himself thanks to the weekend's earlier drama. Retaliating against Raditz, as much as he deserved it, would only ensure that crater was deep enough to bury his corpse once his father was through with him. He couldn't send both cousins home with black eyes, his brother in a cast, and Yamcha with a face that, quite frankly, was more suited to his level of intelligence.

As much as he wanted to prove a point through means Raditz would understand, only hosting enough brains himself to make sense of his fist, he was forced to confront the reckless fuckwit with words alone, words that he hadn't managed to properly formulate before they came screaming out of his mouth. "Goddammit, Raditz! _You_ fucked him up! _You_ took them out there, and then _you_ left them!"

Raditz spun toward the direction of his voice but darted his eyes about the room and squirmed between his feet, clearly fearful that he was about to suffer Vegeta's infamous reputation firsthand. "I was gonna go back! My phone died, just like I told you it was gonna, and I came to charge it and fell asleep. It was an accident! It could happen to anyone!"

The whiny string of excuses had barely tumbled from his cousin's lips when a thought miraculously popped into his thick skull to transform his disposition. Vegeta watched the lightbulb flicker on to energize the gears and pulleys that could descend Raditz's balls back down from where they'd jumped up his abdomen. The smirk with which he met Vegeta's wavering hostility was a smoking gun.

"Even if I was supposed to be on baby watch, which I technically wasn't for the record, it's not like I drank a fucking handle of tequila and passed out at the post."

The comment stung in more ways than Vegeta was willing to admit, the most unsettling being the fact that he'd become so drunk he blacked-out and couldn't remember retreating to bed. In the last patches of memory he hosted, he was alone, pacing circles outside the campfire pit. But now, a part of him wondered if Raditz had returned to witness a stupor that he couldn't recall. Had they talked? Oh dear god… Had Raditz helped him to bed? He refused to let his anxiety show, much less admit to his cousin's accusation without hard evidence to back it up. If Raditz did, in fact, know what he'd done, Vegeta's hand in the blame game was effectively folded. It was out of desperation that he played dumb, unwilling to let his cousin make him the scapegoat for Kakarot's face as he let his mouth continue to run.

"So help me god, Raditz, there's no way in Hell that I'm taking the fucking fall for this! And if I so much as catch wind of you trying to pin it on me, I'll make sure you don't have eyes to see through. I'll rip them out of your thick fucking skull and hang them from your neck as bait for the fucking bears to come and eat the rest of you!"

"Damn, cus. That's super dark." He seemed almost wounded by the ridiculous threat the way his head tipped like a dog, all pouty and droopy-eyed like he'd been returned to the pound.

In a strange way, Raditz had warmed up to him over the weekend, only thanks to taking out Yamcha. His cousin was a sucker for displays of strength, and the moment he witnessed the quarterback wailing pathetically against the pavement under Vegeta's knuckles, his loyalty abruptly shifted. He was on his side, or at least he was trying to be. Antagonizing the moron certainly wasn't helping matters. And if he was being honest, Raditz wasn't going to be the one to throw him under the bus unless he felt threatened. It was Kakarot, the little psycho, who they both had to fear. The kid would be too happy to deliver some far-fetched story to his parents that was impossibly worse than reality if they couldn't pocket their pointing fingers and come together to divert him.

Vegeta discharged whatever remained of his pride through a long, drawn-out sigh. "Raditz, you can't tell your parents that I had anything to do with this. I'll talk to Aunt Gine myself if you both promise to keep to a story so none of us gets in trouble. I'll tell her we were both there, and a storm popped up, not on the radar or anything we detected, and the boys slipped. Nobody abandoned anyone. Can we agree to that?"

When Raditz only stared back dumbly, lips popping open and shut like a fish, Vegeta found himself resorting to a tactic he'd never thought he'd be forced to use, begging, "Raditz, please!"

"Of course, yeah, yeah. We were both there," he nodded, trading looks with the others in the room who were just as confounded by Vegeta's request.

"Kakarot?" Vegeta looked to his youngest cousin whose left eye was a ripe plumb yet still somehow managed to exhibit his suspicious reluctance.

"Why?" The boy asked.

"Why? Because I'll burn all your action figures, and because I'll tell mom you're the one that broke her LaMonte sculpture."

At his brother's threat, Kakarot bugged his good eye and was quick to touch the tip of his thumb to his forefinger and agree, "Ok," before he gestured a zip across his lips.

Tarble, as if he could sense from a room away that he was being left out of the familial ruse, summoned Vegeta to collect him. As he helped the sleepy, sullen boy to brush his teeth and wash his face and dress, he found it hard to ignore Tarble's repeated pleas that they stay. It wasn't like he didn't want to, but on top of bringing their cousins home as promised, there were plenty of loose ends to be dealt with before they could disappear for an indeterminable amount of time.

The upkeep of their house was his responsibility, not the lawn, thankfully, but the rest of it. And even the outer estate he oversaw and ensured their contractors were paid. But that was nothing compared to the gym that he was anxious to return to. Without a viable coach at the academy, they outsourced the job to a private mixed martial arts facility with a trainer who was so lean and prim and proper that at their first meeting, he'd been skeptical of the man's abilities. But his credentials were on record, not just in boxing, but MMA too, with his pupils deriving titles from amatuer and professional rings in nearly every weight class. And being at the gym, with Whis's unending praise and attempts to sway him into a professional career after graduation—though Vegeta wasn't planning to take the sport up professionally, as much as he wanted to—he was flattered nonetheless. He flourished under the light of Whis's pride in him, a feeling that dwindled every night on the drive home as reality sunk in to remind him that it was a pipe dream. If he stuck around, his father would place him somewhere within his cabal to groom him for public office, and if he wasn't, he'd be hiding, working as a bartender at a VFW under a fake name in some rural, bumbfuck town.

Vegeta carefully set his brother in the backseat of his car where Kakarot was already buckled and embraced with the heiress in a goodbye hug. Raditz's gaze loitered on the bottom crests of her ass that peeked from her shorts as she bent over. She almost caught the pervert when she spun around to hug him briefly.

But with himself, the heiress's farewell wasn't quite as familiar. She hovered near the hood of his car with her arms crossed like she was cold, despite the heat, twisting her body back and forth nervously, as if waiting for him to approach her. The second Vegeta stepped into her radius, she dropped her overcautious posture and used both hands to wrap around one of his.

"When are you coming back?"

"The weekend. I dunno… Friday?"

"How 'bout tomorrow?" She combatted his eye roll with one of her own and continued to deride him with a yank on his hand. "Why the hell not! It's summer break, so what the hell do you have to do?" As if she could read him, she pressed him further, "The gym? This place is a mess! You could spend all week here dragging logs out of my lawn! That's a workout you don't have to pay for! Come on."

"Thursday," he conceded.

It wasn't good enough, and she clenched his hand tighter and repeated, "Tomorrow."

"It's a four hour drive one way."

"So? Tomorrow."

"Wednesday."

"Tomorrow!"

"Why tomorrow? You don't want to be alone?"

"I've been alone my entire life. So no. But, if you need me to spell it out for you, I've really fucking missed you, Vegeta. You've avoided me for five years, and at least now I understand why, that it wasn't entirely my fault. And I meant what I said about helping with him. Don't take this the wrong way, but you could use help. And he doesn't want to leave either so… Tomorrow!"

His weight shifted beneath him as her insecurity over their past was so plainly stated. He did avoid her after New Years, for five years, but not because he didn't like her, it was the opposite, and as she said herself, because of Tarble. But he wanted her to know that it wasn't her fault, at least not in the way she imagined; only he couldn't find the means to explain how he'd felt back then, much less how he felt about her now. Instead, he deflected to ask, "When are your parents planning to be back?"

"Does it matter?"

He shook his head. The Briefs were decent people, a little flighty and selfish, but good people at heart, like their daughter.

"Then what's the problem? Tomorrow, or tonight even. I know it's a long drive, but–"

Vegeta surprised himself when he used his hand that was solidly clenched within her grip as leverage to pull her toward him and kissed her quiet. It was quick and chaste and over before his mind had even registered that it had happened at all, but it explained his thoughts better than words ever could, even had those words been available and not lost in the twisted depths of his head.

The heiress seemed just as stunned as he was and stared back at him blinking. The moment she came to, she leapt at him, wrapping her arms around his neck to pull his face into hers, looking at him intently as their foreheads met before she sealed her lips against his. Vegeta's eyes fell shut, and his hands found their way around her back trying his best not to overthink the act, at least not until Kakarot let a woop ring from the backseat of the car that had them both pulling away to glance awkwardly at the three faces that stared back at them, each with wildly different expressions.

"Guess I'll see you when I see you," Bulma said, and despite that she was smiling at him now, there was a defeated undercurrent in the way she'd said it, like she didn't believe he'd come back and that kiss had just become the pinnacle of a relationship that never was and never would be. He wanted to tell her she was wrong. He wanted to explain everything, settle her anxiety, make her believe that he had every intention to return once he'd had the time to think and plan exactly what he'd be willing to divulge, both to her and his father. It wasn't like he could just up and leave for an extended stay at the Briefs' summer house without drawing the man's suspicions or worse. This had to be plotted and perfectly phrased in a way that his old man would find mutually beneficial.

"You will. I swear," he told her and squeezed her hand before he backed toward the open car door.

"Duuuuude," exclaimed Raditz, his mouth hung open and eyes popped wide, darting between the heiress in the driveway and himself.

Before he could follow up such an eloquent expression with thoughts, Kakarot's giggling turned into a childish mockery. "Geta and Bulma sittin' in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g."

"Oh you can fucking spell now can you, Kakarot?"

"Yes?" the little turd responded, clearly not understanding that he had spelled anything at all in his repeating a nursery school taunt. "It means you're girlfriend and boyfriend."

Vegeta ignored him, not in the mood to explain the complicated nuances of relationships to Kakarot, of all people. As he turned to back down the drive, he could see Tarble leaning between the seats, straining his neck to observe the heiress through the windshield. His thoughts on the matter weren't so easily readable as either of his cousins. He didn't appear distressed nor happy about witnessing his brother kiss a girl, but his mind was clearly running circles to determine just where his feelings landed on the matter. As much as Tarble wanted to escape and come back to this place, he wasn't the heiress's biggest fan, and he was most definitely not a fan of sharing his brother's affections. Where his opinion would eventually settle was a crapshoot, but the drive would at least serve as time to let Tarble digest his thoughts.

"Holy shit, if I was a betting man, I'd have lost my ass on that one. You and fucking Bulma Briefs? Nobody's gonna believe me!"

"Oh hell no!" Vegeta slammed the brakes at the top of the driveway to nab the cell phone from his cousin's hands and throw it in the storage pocket on the inside of his door.

"What the hell, cus? Give it back!"

"Naw, there's no fucking way I'm letting you turn my personal life into clickbait. Maybe you can have it back if you promise you aren't gonna be a gossip-mongering jackass."

"I won't!" he whined, not all that convincingly.

Less than an hour into the drive, they'd barely made it to the first gas station before Vegeta would rather pull the car into a guard rail and kill them all than listen to Raditz's ceaseless gripes over not having a phone to paw at. He tossed the stupid device on the seat as he filled the tank while his cousins were inside buying snacks.

Raditz's complaints were quickly satiated; though Vegeta didn't know what was worse now that their drive was filled with the noise of crumpling chip bags, chomping teeth and smacking lips. He flicked on the radio to tune them all out, letting the droll voices of NPR reporters cut through the nonsense of Raditz's expletives as he began to scroll through social feeds.

"No fucking way! Oh damn… dude, you're so fucked."

"What? Why?"

"Uh… Well, word on the feed says the academy is gonna hold a disciplinary hearing before summer's over on whether or not to expel you."

"Fuck that! Who said that?"

"Everyone's saying it. Both Yamcha and Launch's moms are on the PTA."

"So? I didn't hit him on school property. It doesn't count. It's summer break! They can't expel me for that!"

"Repeated acts of violence is how they're spinning it for the school board. Are you really surprised? Come on man, you know our pops have political rivals at that school and they'll look for any excuse to take you down. And besides, you fucked with the wrong darling. The QB? He gets the crowds, the cheerleaders, the ra-ra let's go Dragons. You can't get that kind of school spirit at boxing matches. You're the only one on the team now!"

"Yeah, but I fucking own. I'm undefeated, and not just in state or regionals like their precious football team. I have a national title in that fucking case. And it's the first and only national in Shenron's sad excuse of a display for as long as that pathetic establishment has existed. And I'm the fucking valedictorian!"

Above everything else, _that_ at least should matter, but from the sounds of it, the school only cared about one dumb sport that they were only modestly good at. That they were willing to expel their smartest pupil over an extramural spat with their quarterback drove home the sad reality that the academy cared little about the very purpose it was meant to serve. The small pool of scholarships they gave to students of lesser means each year were obviously skewed toward the sport, as more and more morons were admitted with barely functional brainwaves to tackle a pigskin. Why the fuck did they even bother with academics? At this point, they might as well turn the whole goddamn institution into a training camp for witless thugs.

"God fucking dammit, does intelligence not mean anything to a fucking school anymore? If they even try to expel me, I'm petitioning that they change the name of that asylum to Shenron Prep School for Smelling Your Own Leaking Ass."

"Damn cus, there's kids here!"

"I know there's fucking kids here! Don't pretend that they haven't heard and seen worse."

_Fuck!_ 'Repeated acts of violence' wasn't exactly off the mark, but rather quite an apt description of his reputation at the academy even on school property. If the PTA managed to convince the school board to hold a disciplinary hearing, the only soul on Kami's green earth that could save him from expulsion was his father. If not through his clout alone, he'd succeed through the same vile means he got his way in everything—through money, bribes, and threats, the price of which, in this case, Vegeta would end up paying for.

The rest of the drive he spent ruminating over his shit situation, and knowing he'd brought it on himself thanks to his inability to smother his temper only made it that much worse. Nobody, not even Yamcha, could excuse the behavior he'd forever been unable to contain since he was a kid. It was his father's own behavior that, whether through biology or environmental circumstance, had become his own. He wasn't a bully like his old man, but hard as he tried, he could never reign in his rage if provoked. In many ways, he was worse, because at least his old man checked himself publicly and dealt in other forms of persuasion, ignoble as they were.

Brute force, as far as Vegeta knew, was reserved just for his family. Day-in and day-out, the stress of his profession—navigating between flattery, negotiations, and threats with a litany of politicians, government officials, businessmen, lobbyists, and his own staff—left his fuse shorted. By the time he came home to indulge through bitter vices to 'unwind,' the slightest aggravation was worthy of the full extent of his fury, left him shouting at them as if they'd forgotten what a big shot he was in the world. Kami-forbid they treat him like a common family man.

At the same time, his father deluded himself to think he was. It wasn't just the bullshit lines he fed the press, claiming his public service was inspired by his desire to forge a better world for his children. At least that, his father gritted out with a smile that anyone who knew him privately understood as political, pandering bullshit. More disturbing was the commentary around the dinner table among their relatives, where after a few glasses of scotch and a line or two he'd sneak from the bathroom, he'd derail into a speech that was meant to inspire Vegeta, his brother and cousins to buckle down, work hard, and make their family proud, with Gine all the while smiling and nodding through a second bottle of chardonnay.

Bardock was the only one whose face ever broke during these impromptu dinner rallies. Vegeta had caught on to his uncle's mild resistance, watching his face turn at some ridiculous line his father delivered at Christmas years ago, and ever since he'd discretely tuned his attention on the man whenever his father felt the need to monologue. Sometimes he wondered if Bardock was a spy because his body language was in stark disagreement to whatever convoluted filth came out of the senator's mouth, so much that it was impossible to imagine Bardock working with the man every damn day and not exploding.

In the past few years, as Vegeta became more convinced that he needed to run away, he imagined that Bardock would reveal himself and prove to be an ally. He followed his uncle around at every opportunity, hoping that behind closed doors, if they found themselves alone, Bardock would be man enough to impart his knowledge and clue Vegeta in as to exactly how he could get himself out of this family, discreetly, without unleashing a nationwide press scandal. Nothing ever surfaced. Bardock always played dumb to Vegeta's subtle hints, and that's when he came to the conclusion that Bardock, as much as he clearly disagreed with the senator's vision, he was still a complicit, neutered stooge. Either his uncle truly couldn't see what was happening, or he did and just chose not to act. Neither conclusion inspired much respect.

Gine was an entirely different beast. She was his father's sister and the resemblance showed. The PR company with which she managed his affairs was brutal. The contorted ways Gine spun scandals would shame the devil himself. In a big way, Gine was the reason he was so popular, despite that every campaign promise was instantly thwarted in the dark. Every shitty decision, every vote he made, every bill he backed was spun to the public by her firm through a lens so purposefully convoluted that even the most educated patriot couldn't effectively explain up or down in a way that was clear enough to convince the public at large that they'd voted against their own best interests in supporting him. He took advantage of their ignorance. He was a pretty con man, a charmer, and he'd convinced an entire state of people, real people, into believing that the public services he stole away from them were actually the wrongdoings of opposing party rivals.

There wasn't any adult in Vegeta's vortex to trust. All of them were self-interested, delusional showmen that undermined the health of their family in the name of it. And as Vegeta steered into the gated community where Raditz and Kakarot's estate resided, he hoped Aunt Gine was too busy to come out to the drive. Despite promising Raditz that he'd explain Kakarot's black eye, he wasn't so sure that he could stomach the conversation. He only wanted to shoo them out of his car and head home to sleep off the weekend's miserable hangover.

But as he pulled into the driveway, the taxpayer-subsidized Cadillac his father hated was parked off to the side with its driver inside typing absently into his phone.

_Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck._ Vegeta's stomach wrenched so violently that he fought the urge to pop the door wide open before he'd even parked his car to hurl. His father had never, not once, set aside his career for anything. Even when his mother gave birth to Tarble and passed away, even while the kid was in the NICU fighting for his life, he hadn't postponed a day from his grueling schedule save for her funeral, which of course was publicized. Why the fuck was he here?

"Yo, your pops is here," said Raditz, the moron, like Vegeta didn't have eyes.

Tarble kicked the back of his seat. As much as the wordless fuck you was warranted, his brother had enough sense about him now not to open his mouth.

A part of Vegeta wondered if he'd just driven himself to meet his doom. His father was dangerous not just because of his temper, but more so because of his connections. He'd already covered up the cause of his mother's death, and that was six years ago almost to the day. There wasn't any doubt in his mind that if the man was angry and messed-up enough, he'd kill him accidentally and find a way to sweep the act under the rug. It wasn't a new thought, but one he'd ruminated on the same way his mother had for all those years, and her fear was realized. That fact, however, wasn't the most terrifying part. Worse was that, should her fate become his, it would leave Tarble without anyone to be a wall between them. Tarble wasn't strong, and everyone knew it. He needed Vegeta to protect him.

"Does that mean daddy's home?" asked Kakarot excitably.

"Probably… Dude, you gonna pop the trunk or what?" inquired Raditz, trying to pull Vegeta from his frozen state, his fists wrapped the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip.

The hand he moved to pull the lever felt unlike his own, like a prop or prosthetic that betrayed him to shorten his window of escape. The moment those two fools stepped out of the car, if he had any balls, he'd have used them to peel out the drive and away from a routine course of events. It certainly wouldn't be the first time he'd encountered his father's party face before a group, knowing the man was internally fuming. That's exactly how this would go down, except worse once his aunt saw Kakarot's face.

As if on cue, Gine came striding from the estate's front doors. She fanned herself with a dramatic wave of her hand and curled her nose at the summer air as she crossed the drive toward his car to meet her children. Though before she wound her way around to the back where they both rummaged inside of his trunk, she stopped at Vegeta's window, knocking at the glass even as he lowered it.

"You're late, again, hotshot. Can you at least humble yourself to get out of the car and give me a hug? Or would that insult your delicate masculinity?"

"That's not–"

"Honestly Vegeta, you need to find a way to rid yourself of this toxic behavior. You've made quite a job for us. Find yourself a girlfriend, something to distract you from this senseless violence you seem to attract."

"Yeah, I'm working on that."

His aunt stepped aside to let him out and immediately hugged her arms around him, if only to gauge whether or not he was some testosterone-ladened psychopath that was unwilling to return the gesture. There was a grey zone. He sure as hell didn't like her, but that was due to her personality, not her gender, as she weirdly assumed. Kami, did everyone think he was some gnarly incel? Maybe those fools could have succeeded somewhat in their revenge if that's what everyone secretly believed about him already.

Gine's hug was short-lived, both fortunately and not, as she removed her talons to cry out, so close to his ear that it was left ringing, "Kakarot! What happened? Who hit you?"

Kakarot smiled as his mother bounded toward him. He had some fantastically erroneous story bubbling in the back of his skull, but being unable to use it when it counted, his smile faded as he grumbled, "Nothin' much. Raddy'll tell ya." The bland explanation left him looking painfully constipated as she turned to wait for Raditz to relay the events that bludgeoned her precious baby.

"Got caught in the rain in the treefort. Wasn't on the radar. Tarble slipped and kicked him in the face trying to climb down. Accident, nobody to blame. Couldn't be avoided."

_Nailed it._ Vegeta gave a mocking thumbs-up at his stupid ape of a cousin from behind his mother's shoulder. If Gine didn't catch on to that idiot's piss-poor spin of events, she didn't deserve her job. Kakarot seemed to agree. The abhorrence his little cousin donned as his mother pulled back his hair was downright offended by his brother's shoddy relay of their agreed-upon fiction, as if it was an insult to every storyteller that ever lived. It was a little funny to see him squirm, unable to provide his own account and forced to agree with Raditz's pathetically meager report.

Tarble's expression, however, as Vegeta flipped the seat back to retrieve him, wasn't quite so amusing. He pulled the seatbelt against his chest and held the clip in silent protest, shaking his head.

"Tarble, come on." As Vegeta leaned inside the cab, Tarble's good leg shot into his stomach, not once, but repeatedly, the futile effort of which reactivated his tears when Vegeta caught his ankle and held it in place. "I'm not asking you. Get out."

His brother was losing his damn mind, as if his first glimpse of a different world allowed him to realize that the one he'd been living in was horribly abnormal, a nightmare he was flat out refusing to return to. He wailed against Vegeta's neck as he carried him inside the house.

Gine's shrill admonishment, decrying his reckless care of her children, was already in full effect, bleating from two rooms away. He should have known that plotting a story would be a wasted effort, because everything was his fault, always, even when it wasn't. His aunt paused her lament long enough to shout, "Vegeta, we've been ready to eat for over an hour. Do you mean to make us wait until breakfast?"

The adults were seated at the dining table with his father and aunt at each end, all of them staring intently at him and the boy crying in his arms. Only Bardock found the means to smile and say hello. Neither of his cousins had managed to join them, but their tardiness it seemed was a forgivable offense.

"I thought you were traveling," he said as he slowly made his way to sit, putting a chair between himself and his father.

"Wouldn't that be convenient for you?"

Vegeta didn't know what to make of his father's dry response, which suggested, even if it wasn't true, that he delayed his trip back to the capitol to deal with the threat of his expulsion. The man was going to play this game where at face value he seemed calm and collected, but inserted just enough suggestive commentary to leave Vegeta tilted off his axis.

"What's wrong with the little one?" Gine directed toward Tarble through the noise of her sons as they swarmed on the table like a pack of wildebeests, barely restrained to wait for the cue to eat as they stared at the platters of food set in the middle practically drooling.

"He's just tired," Vegeta lied.

The glass of scotch his father had been sipping hit the table with a thud and rattled the ice cubes. "For Kami's sake, Vegeta! He acts like a baby because you treat him as one. Put the boy down. He can sit at his own chair."

It took some effort to untie Tarble's reluctant arms from his frame, and he slid into the empty seat next to his father, placing his brother on his opposite side. Tarble sniveled and stared into his plate that Vegeta loaded with mashed potatoes, roasted carrots, and a dinner roll as they were passed around, skipping over the meat.

His father was far too observant and never let anything go, especially once he was on a roll. "Vegeta, has your brother no manners? Your aunt has generously provided a meal."

"He's a vegetarian," Vegeta reminded, for what felt like the tenth time.

"He can be a vegetarian on his own time. It wouldn't kill him to put some meat on his bones. The boy's awfully frail."

"Oh stop. Let the child have his principles." Gine said, diverting what would certainly become an argument. Whether she believed what she claimed or not, Vegeta was grateful that she had the sense to see a shitstorm brewing and could divert her brother's instigations.

"Why is that? Are you an animal rights activist?" Bardock asked with genuine curiosity. His question was directed at Tarble, having enough respect to speak to the boy rather than about him, as everyone else seemed to do.

Tarble nodded at his uncle meekly as he tried to find his voice. "I don't want 'em to die."

"But you understand the food chain, right? Predators and prey–"

"I know!" Tarble managed to interrupt whatever line of wisdom his uncle assumed he didn't understand. "But we don't hafta to eat 'em. We just like the taste."

His father shook his glass as he stood, as if to signal that he was bored by the discussion and slipped outside the dining room to refuel. Bardock carried on, gently debating his brother in a way that Vegeta appreciated, listening to his perspective, complimenting points he agreed with, yet still challenging him when he didn't with more questions to make his brother think. Tarble was on his toes, all his earlier weeping forgotten as he gained confidence and found the words to express his views.

"I think this one is going to be running for office before long," Bardock chuckled when his father returned.

"If a five-year-old has convinced you to be a vegetarian, perhaps he can be my chief of staff too," he mocked, turning the man's compliment on its head. He resumed his position at the head of the table, pushing the plate away to make room for his drink, having lost his appetite after his little adventure. "At least one of my sons may be capable of not spoiling his reputation."

"Don't give yourself a stroke. The school board will cave."

"Of course they'll damn well cave, Gine! But the petition isn't going to miraculously go away! It can and will be recalled in the future to use against him."

"You're getting ahead of yourself. So long as there aren't any more incidences, even if the petition is scrounged up by the press, and we're talking two decades from now, he's seventeen. The public would see it as a desperate smear campaign. He's a spitting image of you at that age. And besides, he's a boxer, and a good one, which tilts the lens quite a bit in my opinion."

"Not anymore he's not."

Vegeta shot his head toward his father. "What! You can't–"

"Oh my dear derelict of a son, I don't believe you're in a position to test me. You're done with that vile sport, and I won't hear one more word about it. It's distracting you from college applications. Summer's halfway over, and I've yet to see one. Don't think I'm going and pull strings at Salada without you proving your worth."

Blood pooled inside Vegeta's ears and burned as if they'd been filled with molten wax. As much as he wanted to pitch a fit and shout the truth, that the vile sport in which he participated was a solution, not a problem, and the only thing he gave a damn about, he couldn't say a word.

"It's a lesson for all of you." His father used the tip of his steak knife to point at each of the kids. "We might have paved you a pretty path, but don't think for a second it means you're worthy to walk on it. If history has taught us anything, it's that the greatest dynasties die at the hands of their spoiled offspring. Our legacy will not be squandered by your insolence. Raditz, Kakarot, are you listening?"

Kakarot's rapt focus shot up from the bloody hunk of meat he was sawing into pieces to nod, and Raditz rubbed the back of his head where his mother had cuffed him as he set down his phone.

"Bearing our family's name is a gift, one that was provided to you on the backs of our hard work. You didn't earn it; you don't deserve it, and I promise that you will gain nothing from it unless you put in your time and prove yourselves. That means your academics, your extracurriculars, your reputations all align with our brand." He focused on each of them with an intensity that perhaps only Vegeta understood the full extent of, his pupils dilated to shroud his rich brown eyes in pitless black. "No more detentions or so-called sports meant for lowlife bar brawlers; no more fragile, feminine ideals meant for suburban housewives; no more tall tales and delusional fantasies meant for hapless con artists; and no more dimwitted social distractions meant for second-rate celebrity bloggers. We've provided you with the genes and resources to carry our legacy. The rest is your responsibility, your duty to accomplish yourselves. I promise that the rest of your lives will be very hard should you fail to uphold your end."

The threat wasn't just about inheritance, but even that notion struck a chord with Raditz whose features visibly slackened, likely assuming he'd ride his parents' fortune like a Kardashian, straight into a privileged, adolescent retirement. Tarble, unfortunately, could read the undercurrent. While he had no conception of money, certainly not the long string of numbers that sat in his trusts, he could recognize that hard meant viciously, dangerously impossible. Kakarot was the only one who seemed confused on the whole; his inability to conceptualize anything outside of the black and white conventions of his comic book stories left him pinching his brows together trying to imagine in what world he wouldn't be a hero.

As Gine attempted to spin her brother's uncanny ability to turn an already sour family affair into an ominous shakedown—holding up her wine glass to toast to the Saiyan family dynasty, a name only she still carried within her nuclear division—Vegeta glanced up at Bardock, who was tilting the tines of his fork against the table, frowning much like his youngest son. His lips flattened as he looked to his wife and slowly traded the utensil for a glass of whiskey, hanging it in the air with a dull flick of his wrist.

It wasn't the first time his brother-in-law and employer used his position to discipline his sons, to cut them down and fill their heads with extortionate nonsense and ultimatums outside of his control. As obvious as his uncle's resentment showed, at least to Vegeta, the man did nothing. He swallowed his dissent in one long gulp, and with a shake of the ice cubes in his glass, he departed in search of a refill to drown it completely.

Vegeta would have left the table too had he a viable reason to take Tarble with him. No sooner had he made the wish, did he realize that his brother's bum foot was just the excuse he needed. He poked Tarble's thigh beneath the table and said, "You're squirming. Do you need to use the restroom?"

Tarble nodded and set his fork in the field of mashed potatoes he'd raked across the plate like a therapy sandbox.

"May we be excused?"

His father waved them away with a look that said he was stupid for asking, and better get the kid to the bathroom before he wet himself at the dinner table. If he hadn't asked, he'd have been berated for having no manners. It was a lose-lose a hundred percent of the time.

"You don't really have to pee, right?"

"No. But where are we going?" Tarble was back to himself, it seemed—sharply observant and mostly collected.

Vegeta knew where Bardock would be and crossed the open living room toward the grand staircase to the second floor. The balcony where his uncle often retreated during social events hung off his and his aunt's bedroom, which was so sterile in its daily upkeep, it felt more like a museum exhibit. Whenever he trekked through, he imagined it was—that it was a hundred years from now, and he was passing between velvet ropes at the foot of the bed, feigning a hum of interest at some nerdy curator as she rattled on about the quaint, romantic qualities embedded in this century's private luxury. Not a loose sock was ever left on the floor, nor a wrinkle indented in the comforter, nor book left out on either nightstand. His father had fired their housekeepers half a decade ago, save for a monthly cleaning service, and Vegeta was glad for the fact because Gine's idea of living space was more akin to a mortuary.

Bardock didn't turn around when Vegeta opened the door, being the only one to routinely track him down. Instead, he remained propped against the balustrade, staring across the expanse of lawn at the horizon, the cherry of his cigar glowing like a reflection of the sun that touched it.

"Rough weekend, kid." His uncle's tone danced halfway between statement and question.

"Is that why you're both still here?"

"Naw, you're dad's rolling absent through tomorrow's infrastructure vote. Can't piss off the oil lobbies or the voters. You made it easy, though. It's not often you get an excuse delivered and packaged in such a neat little bow." Bardock turned to grin at him. "So… how'd it feel?"

"What?"

"Taking out that pansy-ass pretty boy? Heard you didn't even throw weight. Just popped him and dropped him."

Vegeta only shrugged in reply as he sat down on one of the iron, entirely impractical and uncomfortable patio chairs and adjusted Tarble in his lap.

"Can I ask why you did it?"

"Same reason as always. He was asking for it."

"Nuh-uh!" piped Tarble. "Raddy said it was 'cause of that girl."

_Goddammit_. Vegeta flushed with self-consciousness at his brother's comment that instantly piqued his uncle's interest. Bardock straightened his posture, smiling crookedly as he asked, "What girl?"

"Geta kissed Bulma."

"No!" His uncle practically danced the few steps across the balcony to scrape out a heavy chair and sit across from them at the table. He bypassed Vegeta's dismayed expression to ask Tarble with the point of his cigar, "You're telling me this one not only fought over a _girl_ but won and kissed her?"

The baffled skepticism his uncle portrayed at Tarble's affirmative nod was more frustrating than the fact that they were having this discussion at all. Everyone, apparently, thought he was some deranged, asexual recluse, incapable of drawing interest from the opposite sex, much less returning it.

"Briefs, huh?" Bardock mused, puffing his cigar as he sat back to digest the news. "Well, it makes sense. I don't know how far back kids' minds go. Hell, I barely remember high school. But let me tell you, when you were elementary, maybe early middle school, you two were inseparable. She'd drag you around always holding hands. That girl had a leash on you. Panchy Briefs was planning your damn wedding."

He did remember, though his perspective back then wasn't quite so cutely, amorously painted. Even now, despite his newfound infatuation with the heiress, he was reluctant to make it known. The moment it was exposed beyond his own wary head, it would snowball toward ruin, whether by his family or hers or their peers. Everyone was chomping at the bit to make a big deal out of something that he didn't hold a solid enough grapple to understand himself.

"Can we not make a thing of this? With my dad or Aunt Gine?" When Bardock's brows twisted quizzically, as if he really believed that those two would be supportive—maybe Aunt Gine would be, but not from genuine interest—Vegeta added, "You know what they're like. They'll get too involved and ruin it. My dad already thinks I'm distracted."

"Are you?" His uncle's question was sharply pointed, like he bought into his father's rhetoric. "I'm a little surprised that you haven't started your college applications. You've always been on top of this shit. What's the hold-up? Crank a few out, and he'll back off."

While that might prove true, and a part of Vegeta seriously considered going through the motions to buy time, he could never bring himself to sit down and fake his way through the personal essays and long tests and recommendations those applications required. Bardock was perhaps the only adult to whom he could explain the gist of his post-high school plans, or at least an abridged version still heavily couched in lies.

"I'm uh… You can't tell my dad… But I don't plan to go to college, not right away at least. I'm going to take some time off after graduation and figure some things out."

Bardock choked on his cigar, or Vegeta's statement rather, and began coughing wildly, banging his palm on the table as if it could help. "Kami, kid! You need to get your ears cleaned, 'cause if you heard that same speech I just did, you know that's not an option. This family doesn't take breaks. There's no way you're not going to uni. Shit, there's no way you're not going to _his_! Why the hell wouldn't you want to?"

Though his uncle's reaction wasn't what he'd hoped for, it was what he'd expected. Vegeta dropped his face in Tarble's hair, without a defensible answer that he was willing to share.

"Listen, kid… Your pops is a sonofabitch, and–" The sound of the patio door snapping shut below halted his uncle's words, and he swiveled his seat around to peer between the banisters.

"Tell my sons to come downstairs. It's time to go." Vegeta's heart sank as his father's voice carried from the lawn in a cold, measured clip.

"You got it, boss." Bardock looked back at Vegeta sorrowfully and waved the tip of his cigar at the door. "Good luck, junior. I hope you'll reconsider. Until then, your secret's safe with me."

A nod of gratitude was all Vegeta could manage, feeling his chest and throat squeeze as he prepared to return home to meet a fate that was routinely certain. After he put Tarble to bed, he'd be called downstairs to talk, then scolded, berated, and goaded into a snide comment or insolent look. Even an eyeroll provided the catalytic justification his father sought to make himself sleep better at night, as if Vegeta had earned it.

His brother had gone quiet as they retraced their steps to meet his father and aunt in the foyer.

Gine clasped Tarble's arm, shaking him gently. "Can you say goodbye, little one?"

Tarble moaned into Vegeta's shoulder as he shook his head no.

"So moody! Did you have too much fun this weekend?" No sooner had Gine asked the question when she interrupted herself, turning to his father to ask, "What's the plan for next weekend? We haven't gotten an invitation."

"For what?"

"The boy's birthday. Surely, there's a party."

He shrugged with disinterest as he shimmied the heel of his foot into his shoe. "Ask his nanny. I'm not on the party planning committee."

Gine turned to Vegeta expectantly, as if some grand affair with clowns and pony rides and inflatable bouncy castles were reserved for the occasion. They weren't, and not because the kid didn't deserve a blowout, but because for the past two years, his brother was strangely melancholy on his birthday, like he was feeding off both his and their father's mood. The duel significance the date held for Vegeta and their father was something the kid could never understand in quite the same way, but he certainly felt it. As much as Vegeta tried to suppress the myriad emotions Tarble's birthday always conjured, the subtext was there and impossible to push aside with smiles and party streamers and chocolate cake.

The last one which Gine graciously offered to host, Tarble cried through its entirety. The cheery attention that was suddenly served to him was overwhelming, and on top of it, conflicted by their mother's ghost, as if Tarble worried he wasn't a worthy trade and that both of them, if they'd had the choice, would have wanted her instead. From Vegeta's perspective, as much as he mourned his mother, he wouldn't degrade himself to even speculate on some unwinnable Sophie's Choice. It was painfully stupid to even consider, and both Tarble, existing here and now, and his mother's memory deserved a hell of a lot more respect than a cheap game of 'Would You Rather'.

Vegeta met Gine's question with the truth. "Actually, the Briefs invited us back up to their lake home next weekend. Tarble wants to do that. He's hoping Kakarot can come."

"The Briefs? Two weekends in a row?" his father questioned.

Gine looked at him narrowly too. "I'll think about it. That family is abhorrently unreliable, and I refuse to leave my children unsupervised. Fool me once."

"Why the hell do they want to host his birthday party?"

"Not a party, just hanging out at the lake."

"Ah, I see... and this would have nothing to do with their daughter?" the old man's refined palate for bullshit called him out.

Gine's mouth rounded in a silent 'ooh' to match the surprise in her wide eyes before it morphed into an evocative smile. "Oh my gods, Vegeta! The Briefs' girl? Really? She's very cute now from what I hear. Thank gods that grease monkey phase is over."

It felt as if his knees would melt out from under him the way his aunt was grinning, half in shock with her hands clasped at her sternum like she wanted to clap.

"A girlfriend will do you some good, soften you up a bit. And that one's smart, well-bred, perhaps a bit wild like her parents, but nothing you can't temper. She's a good match. Don't you think it's a good match?" she asked her brother.

"Mmm," his father hummed and nodded in a way that read no, and over his dead body would he let Vegeta date the heiress or anyone ever. The reaction went over Gine's head as she grew more animated by the prospect of Vegeta being a normal teen with a normal libido and not some morbid recluse who got his rocks off instead by beating the shit out of everyone.

"Well, I think it's great, practically predestined! We saw it coming since you two were in training pants. Honestly, I'm more surprised that it didn't happen sooner."

"It's not a big deal. We're just friends."

"Uh-huh," Gine wagged her eyebrows. "You're not as clever as you think, dear nephew." She tipped her head to the noise of her sons whose laughter could be heard all the way from the kitchen, which from the sounds of it said they were both immersed in some fail video compilation on YouTube. Her insinuation was right though, the second she pressured either of them, they'd cave. Hiding his newfound romance with the heiress wasn't a part of the agreed-upon compromise, and neither of his cousins, even if he'd demanded it of them, would understand the reasons why he wanted to hide it, especially Raditz who acted like Vegeta won the lottery.

The consensus on his aunt's side of the family was certainly swayed in the direction Vegeta hoped for, but his father was his own beast, and he'd balk them all on principle. That Gine or anyone lent approval to the heiress was enough to ensure his father wouldn't. He was petty.

He held the door open with his back looking rather peevish as his sister prattled on about the heiress in chirrupy tones. An exaggerated sigh signaled that he'd had enough, and Gine placed a wet kiss on Vegeta's cheek, ruffled Tarble's hair, and shooed them outside before the senator ruptured an aneurysm.

"Were you planning to ask my permission to take my son for a weekend getaway with a teenage girl?" questioned his father.

It wasn't the train of thought Vegeta expected he'd use to start an argument. He didn't answer as he settled Tarble in the passenger seat, not until he closed the door to face the man. Fighting his voice into a calm, plausible confusion, he asked, "Last weekend you demanded I take him. Now I need permission?"

"Of course you need my fucking permission! You're a child!" The statement, like everything the man did and said, was inverted in his perfect hypocritical fashion. He couldn't help himself. And it didn't matter whether Vegeta gave in to his instigations or not, he was always left staring at the ghoulish negative. At this point, he was going to lose either way.

"Today I'm a child. And when I was eleven and left in charge of him, what was I then?"

"Don't get smart with me," his father warned, pointlessly threatening an outcome that was already carved in stone. Why bother pretending it wasn't?

"What do you care if we're here or not? You didn't even remember it was his birthday!"

Suddenly, his father lunged at him. Grabbing a fistful of his t-shirt, he slammed him backward against the car, his public restraint slipping precariously out-of-bounds as he shouted, "Didn't remember? How the fuck could I forget!"

His eyes were wild, all whites and wide pupils; he looked pained by the accusation. Vegeta meant it as a point of fact, not to intentionally hurt him. Though he'd be lying if it didn't feel good to know there was a conscience hidden somewhere inside the bastard, and he hadn't forgotten the woman completely.

When a light flicked on upstairs inside the house, attracted by his father's commotion, he reigned himself in, brushing the front of Vegeta's shirt back into place. "We'll discuss this at home. I will not have you making a scene for your aunt and her neighbors."

Him make a scene? Vegeta ground his teeth in an effort to remain silent, but with every click of the man's shoes against the pavement striding toward his car, he felt the threads of his composure snapping apart.

"Afraid to show them all where my talent for that vile sport really came from?"

The words left his mouth in a rush, and he regretted them instantly. When his father pivoted back, slow and calm, he was smiling—the kind of smile that said Vegeta was out of his league, just an uppity amateur, foolish enough to go all-in when his would always be the winning hand.

"Vegeta, if I really wanted to hurt you, I wouldn't need to lay a finger on you to do it," he said with a subtle flick of his gaze to the passenger door behind him.

The old man was right. In one simple, almost invisible gesture, he ripped open the very fabric of the universe, exposing a great black hole. Even as Vegeta stood rooted to the solid ground watching his father's car back down the drive, it felt as if the entire cosmos was collapsing around him, sucked toward an event horizon that would, at any moment, blip away his existence. He couldn't breathe. As he scrambled around to the driver's side door, his limbs felt weighted by gravity, and his vision spun about his head with his thoughts in a dizzying smear. There was no mistaking his father's threat. Should Vegeta dare to step out of bounds, he could and would ensure that he never saw his brother again.

He was beginning to feel lightheaded and forced his lungs to inflate through a sharp, shaky breath before he attempted to drive home.

Fear and frustration couldn't begin to describe how he felt, and listening to his brother shift in his seat beside him was only making it worse. The noise of his distress, he swallowed, felt it cut against his throat on the way back down, but his tears burned and broke down his cheeks in a thin current. At least it was dark. As soon as they stopped at an intersection, he wiped them away with a dull hope that Tarble hadn't noticed.

Of course, he did. His brother was hunched down in the passenger seat, watching him warily.

"It's okay, Geta," he said, his tiny voice attempting a show of comfort. But it wasn't okay. It was unfair and fucked-up. He was supposed to be the protector, not the other way around. Instead, he was chickenshit, afraid to stand-up, afraid to run, afraid to do anything but return home with his head down and take his punishment.

Vegeta stared defocused at an oncoming car that whizzed past them, then the red glow of its taillights receding down the dark, county road. As he watched them disappear completely, his helplessness suddenly shifted into anger. His jaw clenched. His grip around the wheel tightened, and in a sudden burst of impulse, he twisted it recklessly and jumped on the gas, peeling out into the northbound lane.

The engine rumbled as he shifted gears, and the needle on the speedometer climbed steadily, ten, twenty, thirty miles over the limit. He had no fucking idea where he was going except away. Adrenaline coursed through his body, lighting his blood on fire and setting his ears to ring. He didn't notice Tarble shouting his name at a frightful pitch until they'd caught up to the car ahead of them, forcing him to slow to a reasonable pace.

"Where are we going? Geta please turn around! You're gonna get in trouble!"

"What else is new, T? I'm already in fucking trouble."

"You're gonna get in more trouble. Where are we going?" his brother repeated.

He hadn't thought that far ahead. He hadn't thought at all and wasn't about to either, or he might just do as Tarble asked and turn around. But to do that would only solidify their futures within their miserable family. There wasn't going to be a second lapse in cowardice. This was it. If he didn't leave now, he never would.

"Put on some music, will you?" He tossed Tarble his phone from the cupholder.

They hadn't been on the road for more than twenty minutes before the device began to buzz in his brother's lap with texts, temporarily muting the music and mood of their escape with the hard reality that their father was at home fuming over their whereabouts. Once texting turned into phone calls, Vegeta pulled the car into a gas station and shut off the cellular network. He filled the tank with gas using his father's credit card and pulled three-hundred dollars from the ATM, the maximum the machine would allow, before he tossed the cards in the trash.

They continued north, despite that the Briefs was an obvious destination, one that his father would easily guess. But they weren't exactly flush with options. It wasn't like a seventeen-year-old could book a hotel for the night, and certainly not for long with that kind of cash on hand until he traded in his car. Besides, he made Bulma a promise. Irrational and short-sighted as it was, he meant to keep it, if only to say goodbye.

It was well past midnight by the time he pulled down the dirt drive. Tarble was asleep with his head against the door, and Vegeta opened it carefully before he lifted him from the car and carried him around to the front porch. The lights were off, but the glow of the television illuminated the room enough to see that she was awake watching some fashion reality program with her hand stuffed inside a bag of pretzels.

When Vegeta found the sliding door was locked, he rapped his knuckles against the glass, a move that jumped the heiress from her skin with a scream and sent a spray of pretzels into the air. As they rained down across the coffee table, Bulma seemed to grasp her senses. Her fright morphed into a giddy sort of puzzlement, and she bounded across the room with round eyes and a smile so bright, Vegeta felt his self-consciousness flare-up in a flush.

Hasty as she was to open the door, she said nothing and stared at him blinking. For the first time in the history of Bulma Briefs, the heiress was rendered speechless.

Vegeta's mind spun through a Rolodex of possible explanations for his late-night visit, but failing to come up with even one that would suffice to cover the actual circumstances, he blurted dumbly, "You said tomorrow. It is… technical–"

Before the words had completely left him, she'd thrown her arms around him, around them both, holding on with a force, like she meant to wring every doubt and despairing thought from his body and replace them with warmth. It was the kind of hug that could. It radiated with heat, like the sun had come up in the middle of the night and embraced him in its rays. And as he wrapped his arm at her back, hugging her close, he wished that the Earth would stop on its axis and let him stay in this place for longer than a moment.

* * *

_Author Note: Thanks so much for reading! I have a few other fics floating around out there. One that's DBZ canon divergen-ish is on here called GUNSHIP, and on AO3 I have a very long in-progress emo band AU that is very emo called Cut From The Team, and a long one-shot called DIVE that's more of a dark comedy. Anywhoo! xoxoxo_


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